Sr Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI

Socket.dev; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

SoFi seeks a Sr Staff Engineer to lead and shape the company’s internal AI platform. You will architect, build, and deploy AI-enabled workflows that improve speed, quality, and employee experience across departments.

You will define forward deployment, onboard diverse teams, and establish reusable platform capabilities for scalable AI enablement. You will collaborate with AI Enablement, product, and engineering leaders to ensure practical, measurable outcomes and a strong partnership that drives

Qualifications

• Deep experience building and operating sophisticated software systems at Sr Staff Engineer scope.
• 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.
• Judgment to distinguish prototypes from department-specific solutions and platform capabilities.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Operate as a product-minded engineer, platform architect, and hands-on builder for AI enablement at enterprise scale.
• Partner with leaders to identify high-value opportunities to transform work with AI.
• Embed with departments to understand workflows and deploy AI-enabled workflows that solve real business problems.
• Lead departments from discovery through onboarding, adoption, production use, and measurable outcomes.
• Develop playbooks, technical patterns, and operating practices for scalable AI enablement.
• Build reusable skills, tools, integrations, agents, and workflow components atop the internal AI platform.
• Contribute to platform improvements based on field deployments and user feedback.
• 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

Sr Staff Engineer

Cross-functional leadership

Product judgment

System design

Distributed systems

LLMs & AI platforms

Communication

Context engineering

Developer tools

AI enablement

Tools

LLM tooling

Agent frameworks

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 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.