Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

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.

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.