Senior Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Experience

SoFi; San Francisco, Seattle (CA, WA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

SoFi is seeking a founding Senior Staff Software Engineer for the AI Platform to set architecture and drive the interactive coding strategy across autonomous coding, CI/CD, and Code Factory. You’ll lead high-impact initiatives across multiple engineering squads and craft scalable solutions, balancing cost, latency, and reliability.

You will mentor engineers, shape roadmaps, and raise standards for resilience and security while collaborating with product areas to deliver robust, enterprise-grade

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree + 4+ Years of Experience OR Master’s Degree + 3+ Years of Experience in software engineering, CS, or related field.
• Proven track record of technical leadership across multiple teams and distributed architectures.
• Adept system design for large-scale, high-availability distributed systems and APIs.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based architectures, model APIs, and AI-assisted development tools.
• Experience designing or operating model evaluation pipelines, AI gateways, or dynamic routing systems.
• Ability to analyze infrastructure economics, capacity trade-offs, and telemetry.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
• Commitment to engineering best practices, security guardrails, data privacy, and maintainable design.

Responsibilities

• Set Technical Direction for enterprise AI Gateway, model routing, evaluation platform, and harness vending across business units.
• Shape Strategy Roadmaps by identifying bottlenecks and translating into 12–24 month technical plans.
• Lead AI Economics Engineering (cost models, metering, telemetry, routing policies).
• Drive Cross-Group Initiatives spanning multiple teams with shared interfaces and contracts.
• Resolve Architectural Deficiencies in latency, throughput, and state across distributed systems.
• Evaluate Build-vs-Buy choices for AI tooling and integration patterns.
• Represent Group Architecture in planning and RFCs and drive design reviews.
• Raise Operational Excellence with production standards, incident response, post- incident reviews.
• Mentor Senior (IC3) and Staff (IC4) engineers to foster craft, ownership, and safety.

Skills

Technical leadership

System design

Distributed systems

LLM-based architectures

Model APIs

AI development tooling

Security guardrails

Data privacy

Cross-functional leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s Degree + 4+ Years

Master’s Degree + 3+ Years

Tools

None specified

Job description

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice

Who we are:

Shape a brighter financial future with us.

Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance.

We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.

The role:

SoFi's AI Platform team builds the foundation that lets every engineer at SoFi ship faster, safer, and with more leverage from AI. Our AI Developer Experience (AI DevEx) team owns SoFi's interactive coding strategy and the underlying infrastructure: AI economics, coding harnesses and harness vending, our evaluation platform, the AI Gateway, and intelligent model routing.

As a founding Senior Staff Software Engineer, you'll be the technical lead and subject matter expert for this area across AI Platform: setting architecture, shaping the interactive coding strategy, and leading work across Autonomous Coding, CI/CD, Code Factory, and our customer engineering teams.

What you’ll do:

• Set Technical Direction: Define and drive the architecture for the enterprise AI Gateway, model routing, automated evaluation platform, and harness vending, ensuring seamless support for interactive and autonomous workflows across multiple business units.
• Shape Strategy Roadmaps: Proactively identify systemic developer productivity bottlenecks, translate opportunities into a 12–24 month technical roadmap, and execute high-impact design and build initiatives.
• Lead AI Economics Engineering: Architect cost models, metering systems, telemetry, and adaptive routing policies that balance model accuracy, latency, and operational spend across the engineering organization.
• Drive Cross-Group Initiatives: Plan and technically lead initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams; establish shared interfaces and platform contracts with Autonomous Coding, CI/CD pipelines, and Code Factory.
• Resolve Architectural Deficiencies: Identify and remediate root causes of complex architectural bottlenecks (latency, throughput, state management, dependencies) across distributed systems.
• Evaluate Build-vs-Buy Choices: Continuously assess emerging AI tooling and foundational models, recommending vendor-neutral, future-proof integration patterns.
• Represent Group Architecture: Lead department-level technical planning, establish architectural RFC standards, and facilitate rigorous design reviews across product areas.
• Raise Operational Excellence: Set production standards for resilience, testing, and deployment; act as a lead incident resolver capable of coordinating responses to high-severity incidents and driving post-incident reviews to root-cause prevention.
• Mentor Elevate Talent: Actively coach and develop Senior (IC3) and Staff (IC4) engineers, cultivating an engineering culture of craft, ownership, and psychological safety.

What you’ll need:

• Education Minimum Experience

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree + 4+ Years of Experience OR Master’s Degree + 3+ Years of Experience in software engineering, computer science, or a related technical field.
• Proven track record of technical leadership on software initiatives spanning multiple teams and complex distributed architectures.
• Adept system design capability with large-scale, high-availability distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and cross-domain APIs.
• Hands-on engineering experience building with LLM-based architectures, model APIs, and AI-assisted development tools (coding agents, developer harnesses, prompt/context evaluation, tool integration).
• Hands-on experience designing or operating model evaluation pipelines, AI proxies/gateways, or dynamic routing systems.
• Demonstrated ability to analyze infrastructure unit economics, capacity trade-offs, and operational telemetry.
• Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a track record of driving technical alignment across engineering squads and leadership.
• Commitment to engineering best practices, security guardrails, data privacy, and maintainable software design.

AI-Assisted Engineering Expectations:

• Use AI tools responsibly to accelerate prototyping, explore new architectures, and streamline ramp-up across new domains.
• Review AI-generated code and architecture critically, enforcing rigorous automated testing, safety, and long-term maintainability.
• Adhere strictly to data-handling and security protocols to safeguard proprietary and member data.
• Elevate team productivity by sharing effective AI development workflows, spec templates, and evaluation guardrails.

Nice to have:

• Experience designing or scaling internal developer platforms (IDPs) and developer tooling at enterprise scale.
• Practical exposure to FinOps frameworks for tracking and optimizing cloud or AI compute spend.
• Direct experience developing autonomous agentic workflows or deep integrations into engineering development lifecycle tools.
• Background in financial technology, banking platforms, or regulated engineering environments.

Compensation and Benefits

The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.

To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page!

SoFi provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law.

The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

NewYork applicants: Notice of Employee Rights

SoFi is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, SoFi offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email [e-mail].

We are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico at this time.