Sofi · Seattle; CA - San Francisco
Principal Engineer, Digital Identity
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...
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
You will be the technical leader for Digital Identity at SoFi under the Sofi Technology Solution Group: the platform group that
powers identity, authorization, and entitlements for every product and every member across the company. Digital Identity runs
Tier-0 infrastructure: the highest criticality rating at SoFi. Every product line, banking, lending, investing, credit cards,
crypto depends on these platforms to know who a member is, what they're entitled to, and what they're authorized to do. When these
platforms are down, SoFi is down.
You'll define the technical strategy for this group. You'll architect solutions for complex, ambiguous problems: multi-person
access patterns, cross-organizational platform convergence, and data integrity at financial-services scale. You'll build the
engineering processes and culture that let a lean team operate Tier-0 infrastructure with confidence. And you'll push the
boundaries of how we build, leveraging AI to accelerate development, prototype faster, and experiment with approaches that would
have been impractical two years ago.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
Platform Technical Strategy
Digital Identity operates multiple Tier-0 platforms spanning identity resolution, entitlement management, and fine-grained
authorization. You own the technical strategy across all of them: setting the architectural direction, executing and leading
designs, and ensuring the platforms evolve as a coherent system rather than independent services.
Complex Authorization Architecture
SoFi is expanding into scenarios where multiple people interact with shared financial resources: across business, family, and
custodial contexts. You'll design the unified platform architecture that handles these patterns at scale: consistent access
models, compliance-grade audit trails, and enforcement of regulatory requirements. This is one platform problem with many product
surfaces.
Cross-Organization Platform Convergence
SoFi operates and integrates with multiple technology organizations with overlapping identity and authorization infrastructure.
You'll lead the architectural vision for convergence: a shared platform primitives that multiple organizations consume while
preserving the flexibility each product line needs. This requires navigating competing priorities, different technical stacks, and
organizational boundaries.
Operational Excellence & Data Integrity
Tier-0 financial platforms demand more than uptime. You'll architect the verification and reconciliation systems that prove these
platforms are correct: automated integrity checks, drift detection, and self-healing mechanisms. You'll establish the operational
processes, incident response standards, and reliability practices that let the team ship with confidence and sleep at night.
Engineering Culture & Team Uplift
You'll raise the bar for how this team builds software. That means establishing rigorous design review processes, defining
engineering standards that compound over time, mentoring senior ICs into technical leaders, and creating the feedback loops that
turn incidents into prevention. You're not just the best engineer on the team: you're the reason the whole team gets better.
Strategic Investment Identification
You won't just execute on the roadmap handed to you. You'll identify the next set of high-leverage technical investments: where
the platforms should go, what capabilities are missing, which emerging patterns (in authorization, in AI, in infrastructure)
should be adopted before the business asks for them.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Required:
- Distributed systems architecture at scale. You've designed and shipped platforms that other engineering teams depend on: not
just consumed services, but built them. You understand the failure modes of event-driven systems, eventual consistency, and
cross-service data integrity. You've made hard tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and latency in production.
- Technical leadership with accountability built in. You don't just design systems: you design systems that prove they're
correct. Reconciliation mechanisms, audit trails, integrity guarantees, automated verification. You've built infrastructure
where "trust but verify" is architecture, not process.
- AI fluency and innovation. You actively use AI to build, prototype, and experiment. You've integrated AI-assisted development
into your workflow and can articulate where it accelerates engineering and where it introduces risk. You push teams to adopt
AI-native approaches to development not as a novelty, but as a competitive advantage in velocity and experimentation.
- Group-level influence and execution. You've driven technical strategy across multiple teams. You've navigated ambiguity where
business goals were clear but the right technical problems to solve were not. You've represented your organization's technical
direction to peer groups and senior / executive leadership.
- Engineering culture builder. You've established processes, standards, and practices that made entire teams more effective and
not just shipped features yourself. You care about design review rigor, operational readiness, on-call excellence, and
mentoring senior engineers into technical leaders.
- Ownership of outcomes, not just systems. You measure your work by what it enabled such as products shipped, risks eliminated,
teams unblocked and not by the complexity of what you built.
Preferred:
- Experience building identity & authorization platforms especially in multi-tenant or consumer-facing contexts. Familiarity with
relationship-based access control models, fine-grained authorization systems, or identity federation infrastructure.
- Experience in financial services or regulated industries where compliance, audit trails, and data integrity are architectural
requirements, not afterthoughts.
- Track record of platform convergence: merging or unifying infrastructure across acquisitions, subsidiaries, or organizations
with different technical stacks.
What This Isn't:
This is not a role for someone who wants to write code in a corner. You'll spend significant time on architecture, cross-team
alignment, design reviews, and mentorship. You will write code and drive credibility with your depth but the highest-leverage
output is the technical direction you set, the engineering culture you build, and the engineers you develop.
WHY THIS ROLE?
- Scope. Digital Identity is horizontal infrastructure. Every product at SoFi depends on your platforms. A design decision you
make affects millions of members.
- Hard problems. Multi-person financial authorization, cross-org platform convergence, data integrity at Tier-0 scale. These
aren't optimizations: they're greenfield architecture for a company-wide platform.
- Visibility. Tier-0 means executives know when you ship and when you don't. Impact is not abstract here.
- Build + Lead. Deep distributed systems work and Group-level technical leadership. You’ll build both muscles, every week. You'll
architect systems and build the team's engineering culture in equal measure.
- AI-forward engineering. We're not waiting for the industry to figure out how AI changes platform engineering. You'll help
define that for Digital Identity, using AI to move faster, experiment more, and build systems that would have been impractical
with traditional approaches alone.
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 ACCOMMODATIONS@SOFI.COM.
DUE TO INSURANCE COVERAGE ISSUES, WE ARE UNABLE TO ACCOMMODATE REMOTE WORK FROM HAWAII OR ALASKA AT THIS TIME.
Internal Employees
If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open
roles.
Role
Principal Engineer, Digital Identity
Category
Infrastructure
Locations
Published
July 16
Deadline
August 16