Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice

Who we are:

The Role

You will be the technical leader for Digital Identity at SoFi: the platform group that powers identity authorization and entitlements for every product and every member across the 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 theyre entitled to and what theyre authorized to do. When these platforms are down SoFi is down.Youll define the technical strategy for this group. Youll architect solutions for complex ambiguous problems: multi-person access patterns cross-organizational platform convergence and data integrity at financial-services scale.

Youll build the engineering processes and culture that let a lean team operate Tier-0 infrastructure with confidence. And youll 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 Youll 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. Youll 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. Youll 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. Youll architect the verification and reconciliation systems that prove these platforms are correct: automated integrity checks drift detection and self-healing mechanisms. Youll 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: Youll 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. Youre not just the best engineer on the team: youre the reason the whole team gets better.

Strategic Investment Identification: You wont just execute on the roadmap handed to you. Youll 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 Were Looking For

Required Qualifications

• Distributed systems architecture at scale. Youve 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. Youve made hard tradeoffs between consistency availability and latency in production.
• Technical leadership with accountability built in. You dont just design systems: you design systems that prove theyre correct. Reconciliation mechanisms audit trails integrity guarantees automated verification. Youve built infrastructure where trust but verify is architecture not process.
• AI fluency and innovation. You actively use AI to build prototype and experiment. Youve 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. Youve driven technical strategy across multiple teams. Youve navigated ambiguity where business goals were clear but the right technical problems to solve were not. Youve represented your organizations technical direction to peer groups and senior / executive leadership.
• Engineering culture builder. Youve 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 Qualifications

• 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 Isnt

This is not a role for someone who wants to write code in a corner. Youll 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 arent optimizations: theyre greenfield architecture for a company-wide platform.
• Visibility. Tier-0 means executives know when you ship and when you dont. Impact is not abstract here.
• Build Lead. Deep distributed systems work and Group-level technical leadership. Youll build both muscles every week. Youll architect systems and build the teams engineering culture in equal measure.
• AI-forward engineering. Were not waiting for the industry to figure out how AI changes platform engineering. Youll 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.

About SoFi

SoFi is a member-first personal finance platform serving millions of members. We offer banking lending investing insurance and more all in one app. Our engineering culture values ownership accountability and building platforms that scale across product lines rather than bespoke solutions per vertical.

Digital Identity is one of the most critical engineering groups at SoFi. Were a lean senior team solving company-wide problems at the intersection of security scale and member experience.