Sr Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI

SoFi; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

SoFi is building an internal AI platform and seeks a Sr Staff Engineer to define what forward deployment means and shape the platform and organization that bring it to life.

You will work with the AI Platform engineering team, product leaders, and subject-matter experts to identify opportunities, onboard departments, and build durable platform capabilities. You will define playbooks, patterns, and scalable operating practices as the team scales.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building and operating sophisticated software systems at Sr Staff Engineer equivalent scope.
• Track record leading technically ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from problem definition through production adoption.
• Strong product judgment and instinct for core problems behind requests.
• Experience designing applications, platforms, developer tools, workflow systems, or distributed systems.
• Practical experience building with large language models, tool use, context engineering, agents, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop patterns.

Responsibilities

• Operate as a product-minded engineer, platform architect, and hands-on builder across complex workflows.
• Partner with leaders to identify high-value opportunities to transform work with AI.
• Embed with departments to map workflows, data, and measures of success; deploy AI-enabled workflows.
• Lead departments from discovery through onboarding, adoption, and production use.
• Develop playbooks, patterns, and operating practices to scale AI enablement across the company.
• Build reusable skills, tools, integrations, agents, and workflow components on top of SoFi's internal AI platform.
• Contribute to platform enhancements when field deployments reveal missing capabilities.
• Create tight feedback loops among users, AI Enablement, product, and platform engineering.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior business and technology leaders.

Skills

Senior software engineering

Cross-functional leadership

Product judgment

Distributed systems

Large language models

Communication

Job description

Who we are

Shape a brighter financial future with us.

The Role

SoFi is building an internal AI platform that will change how employees across the company work. It combines models, enterprise context, tools, memory, governed capabilities, and an extensible agent harness so teams can move beyond chat and apply AI to meaningful business workflows.

You will work with the AI Platform engineering team, product leader, and subject-matter experts across the company. You will help departments reimagine how their work gets done, build the first workflows that make that future real, and turn what you learn in the field into durable platform capabilities.

Because you will be the first person in this role, you will also define what forward deployment means at SoFi: how we discover opportunities, onboard departments, build and evaluate workflows, measure outcomes, support users, and translate repeated needs into platform investments. Your work will establish the technical and operating foundation for a broader AI enablement capability.

This role does not have a playbook. It is an opportunity to write one and to define how applied AI changes the way work gets done across SoFi. This is a rare opportunity to shape both an enterprise AI platform and the organization that brings it to life.

What You'll Do

• You will operate as a product-minded engineer, platform architect, and hands-on builder. One week you may be mapping a complex Finance workflow with domain experts; the next, prototyping an agentic solution, defining its evaluations, and contributing a new capability to the shared platform.
• Partner with leaders and subject-matter experts across SoFi to identify high-value opportunities to transform work with AI.
• Embed with internal departments to understand their workflows, systems, data, constraints, and measures of success and deploy AI-enabled workflows that solve real business problems.
• Lead departments from initial discovery through onboarding, adoption, production use, and measurable outcomes.
• Develop the playbooks, technical patterns, and operating practices that allow AI enablement to scale across the company.
• Build reusable skills, tools, integrations, agents, and workflow components on top of SoFi's internal AI platform.
• Contribute directly to the platform when field deployments reveal missing capabilities or opportunities to improve the developer and user experience.
• Create tight feedback loops among users, AI Enablement, product, and platform engineering.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior business and technology leaders navigating the opportunities and tradeoffs of applied AI.

What You'll Need

• Deep experience building and operating sophisticated software systems at Sr Staff Engineer equivalent scope.
• A track record of leading technically ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from problem definition through production adoption.
• Strong product judgment and an instinct for finding the real problem behind a feature request.
• Experience designing applications, platforms, developer tools, workflow systems, or distributed systems.
• Practical experience building with large language models, including tool use, context engineering, agents, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• The judgment to distinguish among a prototype, a department-specific solution, and a capability that belongs in a shared platform.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills across technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Comfort creating structure, standards, and momentum in a space where the operating model is still being formed.

Nice to Have

• Experience as a founding or early Forward Deployed Engineer, product engineer, product manager, solutions architect, or technical leader for an enterprise platform.
• Experience building an internal developer platform, AI platform, enterprise productivity product, or agentic system.
• Experience building evaluation and feedback systems for nondeterministic or AI-enabled products.
• Experience operating in financial services or another highly regulated environment.

What Success Looks Like

• Established a repeatable model for taking departments from opportunity discovery to successful production use.
• Delivered AI-enabled workflows that create measurable improvements in speed, quality, capacity, or employee experience.
• Built a trusted partnership among internal users, AI Enablement, and the AI Platform organization.
• Converted insights from early deployments into reusable capabilities within the shared platform.
• Defined standards for onboarding, workflow development, evaluation, deployment, support, and continuous improvement.
• Created the technical and operating foundation from which SoFi can scale its Forward Deployed Engineering and AI Enablement capabilities.

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.

New York 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.