Senior Principal Software Engineer, Applied Generative AI

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to provide AI leadership to SoFi’s technology organization. In this role, you will directly influence, impact and lead the AI enablement strategy for SoFi in collaboration with key engineering and data science leaders. Your work will focus on championing best practices for applying AI to a wide variety of domains, particularly software development and our back-office, along with leading the vision for the infrastructure and approach required to support these use cases and ensuring we can rapidly adopt the latest foundation model capability and emerging best practices. To facilitate this, you will oversee a build over buy approach to make sure we avoid friction due to heavy dependency on third party vendors while ensuring we make judicious investments in vendors that are likely to accelerate our delivery and not inhibit future innovation.

You will have the opportunity to define and solve challenging problems in a fast-paced, highly collaborative and innovative organization. The ideal candidate will be a thought leader in applying AI in the software development domain with experience impacting business users and non-technical team members. You should have experience and a willingness to mentor and develop skills across our organization and evangelize the use of AI alongside traditional techniques to improve the velocity and quality of the company. You will be expected to dive in and lead prototyping and production solutions as needed to drive these broad-based organizational changes.

What You’ll Do:

• Technical leadership - Provide thought leadership around enabling and applying  AI across the company.


• Strategic Partnership  - Serve as a key strategic technical advisor to engineering and select business leadership, influencing roadmaps, participating in planning sessions, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.


• Innovate - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive innovation and advancements in AI assisted developer productivity flows.


• Operational Excellence - Be a subject matter expert, role model practitioner across the developer tooling domain including operational excellence.  Drive observability strategy and practices, including SLOs, and guiding teams on critical incident resolution, root-cause analysis and remediation.


• Mentor - Collaborate with engineers across the Platform organization, provide mentorship, and expertise to enhance the overall technical capabilities of teams.


• Continuous Improvement - Contribute to creating a culture of continuous learning, data-driven decisions and improvements. Proactively identify and manage risks.


• Collaborate –Build strong working relationships with coworkers, cross-organizational leaders, including engineering managers and product managers.


• Influence - Be a change agent influencing and scaling the adoption of AI-enabled developer tooling and best practices across the engineering organization.

What you'll need:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field.


• 15+ years of software development experience


• Significant experience in the last several years applying Generative AI in software development and for end users, ideally in the context of a medium or large enterprise.


• Expertise in public cloud platforms (AWS is preferred), containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and related technologies.


• Deep understanding of modern development practices and CI/CD and how AI can change and improve on these practices to increase both quality and velocity.


• Familiarity with ‘agentic’ architectures including SDKs, context engineering, MCPs, authorization .


• Full stack "operator": ability to both create and execute the business and product strategy; with clear objectives, but limited, ambiguous, or varied direction


• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Who you are:

• You are customer-obsessed and have an affinity for solving complex problems and shipping impactful features, and make pragmatic high judgment decisions without letting perfection become the enemy of progress.


• You demonstrate extremely high levels of technical knowledge, ingenuity and creativity. 


• You work and play well with others; SoFi is a highly collaborative workplace and a melting pot of diverse talent.


• You are confident in asking difficult questions and challenging your team while also keenly listening and taking feedback.


• You are a voracious learner - you have the ability to quickly and independently acquire proficiency in new languages and technologies.


• You value mentorship and constantly look for ways to improve the technical depth of the individuals on your teams including peers and peer teams.


• You are open to feedback and comfortable engaging in continuous learning processes to improve how you work as well as what we work on