Principal Software Engineer, AI Accelerated Sdlc

SoFi SoFi · Fintech · San Francisco, CA · Engineering

Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy and architecture of an internal developer platform in an AI-first SDLC, enabling engineers with AI-enabled development practices and tooling. Focus on technical leadership, strategic partnership, innovation, and operational excellence in AI tools, infrastructure, and agent frameworks.

What you'd actually do

  1. Technical leadership - Provide thought leadership for the technical architecture, design, and delivery for AI enabled tools across the SDLC including plan, code, test, build, deploy, observe and remediate.
  2. Strategic Partnership - Serve as a key strategic technical advisor to leadership, influencing roadmap, participating in planning sessions, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.
  3. Innovate - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive innovation and advancements in AI assisted developer productivity flows.
  4. 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.
  5. Mentor - Collaborate with engineers across the Platform organization, provide mentorship, and expertise to enhance the overall technical capabilities of teams.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of professional software development experience
  • 2+ years in a technical leadership role
  • Expertise in AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor)
  • Expertise in AI infrastructure (e.g., MCP, AWS Bedrock, RAGs, vector dbs)
  • Expertise in agent frameworks (e.g. Langchain, Langgraph, CrewAI)
  • Experience developing in a cloud environment (AWS)
  • Experience using containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Experience with cloud-native technologies
  • Experience with service meshes (e.g., Istio, Envoy)
  • Proven track record devising and launching creative solutions to developer experience challenges
  • Strong understanding of software design principles
  • Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture
  • Proven proficiency shipping enterprise applications in one or more programming languages (Go, Python, Java, Kotlin, etc.)
  • Exceptional verbal and written communication
  • Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
  • Ability to own, manage and deliver complex projects from scoping through launch
  • Experience leading Agile development practices

Nice to have

  • Familiarity with security standards
  • Familiarity with compliance (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA)
  • Familiarity with risk management frameworks relevant to financial and regulated industries

What the JD emphasized

  • AI enabled tools across the SDLC
  • AI assisted developer productivity flows
  • AI-enabled developer tooling and best practices

Other signals

  • AI enabled tools across the SDLC
  • AI assisted developer productivity flows
  • AI-enabled developer tooling and best practices