Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

SoFi SoFi · Fintech · Seattle, WA · Engineering

Principal Engineer leading the Digital Identity platform at SoFi, focusing on identity, authorization, and entitlements. The role involves defining technical strategy, architecting complex solutions for multi-person access and cross-organizational convergence, ensuring operational excellence and data integrity for Tier-0 infrastructure. The role also emphasizes building engineering culture and identifying strategic technical investments, including leveraging AI to accelerate development and experimentation.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. You'll lead the architectural vision for convergence: a shared platform primitives that multiple organizations consume while preserving the flexibility each product line needs.
  4. You'll architect the verification and reconciliation systems that prove these platforms are correct: automated integrity checks, drift detection, and self-healing mechanisms.
  5. 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.

Skills

Required

  • Distributed systems architecture at scale
  • Technical leadership with accountability
  • AI fluency and innovation
  • Group-level influence and execution
  • Engineering culture builder

Nice to have

  • mentoring senior ICs into technical leaders
  • design review rigor
  • operational readiness
  • on-call excellence

What the JD emphasized

  • Tier-0 infrastructure
  • When these platforms are down, SoFi is down
  • compliance-grade audit trails
  • prove these platforms are correct
  • AI fluency and innovation
  • AI-assisted development
  • AI-native approaches to development

Other signals

  • AI to accelerate development
  • AI to prototype faster
  • AI to experiment with approaches
  • AI-assisted development
  • AI-native approaches to development
  • emerging patterns (in AI)