Staff Software Engineer, Bank

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Who we are:

The Role

SoFi is launching a brand-new commercial banking product and we need a Senior Staff Engineer to be its technical backbone.

Commercial Banking is SoFis entry into institutional commercial banking. Were building the infrastructure that lets large institutional clients in crypto fintech and enterprise finance manage their money at SoFi real-time payments multi-account treasury management and a closed-loop settlement network that operates 24/7/365. The systems you design will handle real institutional money from day one. The network you help architect SEN (SoFi Exchange Network) could become the default settlement rail for the industry.

As the Senior Staff Engineer on the Commercial Banking team youll be the technical leader the team looks to for the hardest problems system design API contracts payment correctness performance and reliability. Youll set the technical bar make architectural decisions that stick and write the code that proves them out. This is a hands-on role: youll be deep in the codebase while also shaping the direction for the engineers around you.

What Youll Do

Architect and Build

• Own the technical architecture for Commercial Bankings core systems payment orchestration client onboarding workflows API Gateway real-time settlement and the services that power the client-facing experience.
• Design and implement the SoFi Exchange Network (SEN) a real-time 24/7/365 closed-loop payment network enabling instant settlement between SoFi commercial clients.
• Build the client onboarding orchestrator: a stateful workflow engine that provisions entities bank accounts entitlements payment rails limits and pricing with retry rollback and idempotency guarantees.
• Design enterprise-grade identity RBAC and maker/checker approval systems that support complex organizational structures with scoped account access per-rail permissions and configurable payment limits.
• Define API contracts that institutional clients will integrate against getting the abstractions error models and versioning right from day one.
• Architect a sandbox environment that realistically simulates every payment rail enabling clients to build and test their integrations with confidence.

Set the Technical Standard

• Establish system design patterns coding standards and engineering best practices for the Commercial Banking codebase.
• Drive technical decisions on data modeling service boundaries consistency guarantees and failure handling across payment workflows where correctness is non-negotiable.
• Own observability strategy structured logging distributed tracing alerting and dashboards that give the team confidence in production.
• Lead technical design reviews and code reviews. Raise the quality bar and make it stick through example not just feedback.
• Identify and address technical debt proactively knowing when to take shortcuts for speed and when to invest in the right long-term solution.

Lead Through Influence

• Be the go-to technical leader on the team the person engineers come to when theyre stuck on a design problem a performance issue or a tricky integration.
• Mentor engineers at all levels. Help senior engineers grow toward staff-level thinking; help mid-level engineers develop stronger system design instincts.
• Partner with engineering management to shape the technical roadmap estimate complexity and sequence work for maximum impact.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment with other engineering teams at SoFi working across identity entitlements accounts payments and core banking systems to ensure clean integration points.
• Represent the teams technical perspective in discussions with Product Compliance Risk and Operations translating business requirements into sound engineering decisions.

Make It Production-Ready

• Design systems that handle real money with the reliability and correctness that institutional clients demand every transaction must be accounted for every failure mode handled.
• Build for scale from day one systems that work for early clients but are architected to support hundreds without rework.
• Own the technical side of client go-live: integration health checks performance validation monitoring readiness and production cutover.
• Drive incident response and post-mortems. Build a culture where production issues are learning opportunities not blame events.

What Youll Need

• 7 years of software engineering experience with a sustained track record of technical leadership on complex production-critical systems.
• Deep distributed systems expertise you can design services end-to-end reason about consistency and ordering guarantees and make pragmatic tradeoffs between correctness availability and latency.
• Hands-on mastery of JVM-based stacks (Kotlin or Java Spring Boot) and modern infrastructure (Kubernetes AWS/GCP Terraform CI/CD pipelines).
• Strong API design sensibility youve designed APIs that external consumers depend on and you understand the long-term cost of getting contracts wrong.
• Experience with stateful workflow systems youve built or operated long-running retryable idempotent workflows in production.
• Proven ability to lead without authority you influence technical direction through the quality of your ideas your code and your ability to bring people along.
• Excellent communication skills you can write clear technical design documents explain complex systems to non-technical stakeholders and make your reasoning legible to the team.
• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice to Have

• Experience building financial systems payments ledger treasury banking or fintech where auditability correctness and regulatory compliance are table stakes.
• Experience building real-time payment systems (FedWire FedNow RTP ACH origination) or settlement networks.
• Background in commercial or institutional banking (treasury management FBO/omnibus accounts correspondent banking).
• Experience with crypto-adjacent financial infrastructure custodian banking exchange settlement stablecoin operations.
• Familiarity with AML/KYB compliance workflows and transaction monitoring in a regulated banking environment.
• Experience building developer-facing products API gateways developer portals sandbox environments webhook infrastructure.
• Prior work with workflow orchestration engines (Temporal Cadence Step Functions) for long-running stateful processes.
• Experience with event-driven architectures Kafka event sourcing or CQRS patterns in high-throughput systems.