Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Platform
SoFi
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Who we are:
Shape a brighter financial future with us.
Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance.
We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.
The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Staff Engineer to join our Cloud Platform team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deliver the self-service abstractions and foundational cloud primitives that empower teams to build efficiently on AWS. Your work will focus on compute, storage, networking, and authentication, providing scalable, secure, and reliable building blocks that allow other teams to accelerate development and innovation. You will collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders across the company to drive architectural decisions, influence best practices, mentor engineers, and own large-scale projects from ideation to production.
What You’ll Do:
- Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Define and execute the technical strategy for core cloud platform services—including compute (EC2, Serverless), storage (S3, RDS, DynamoDB), networking (VPC, routing, service meshes), and authentication (AWS IAM, custom auth flows).
- Lead the design and implementation of self-service frameworks and tooling that allow product teams to spin up secure, scalable infrastructure quickly.
- Champion best practices in infrastructure-as-code (IaC), ensuring consistent, repeatable, and automated provisioning of cloud resources.
- Architecture & Implementation
- Architect scalable, reliable, and highly available systems that handle the platform’s growth and evolving needs, ensuring low latency and strong performance.
- Implement security and compliance best practices for authentication and identity management, collaborating with security teams to safeguard customer data and meet regulatory requirements.
- Innovate to reduce complexity and accelerate the adoption of new cloud technologies, proactively identifying and solving bottlenecks in infrastructure or tooling.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with product teams, security, DevOps, and other engineering organizations to understand requirements, identify gaps, and deliver solutions that simplify the developer experience.
- Serve as a key technical advisor to leadership, influencing roadmaps, participating in planning sessions, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.
- Mentorship & Influence
- Mentor and guide engineers across the organization, sharing best practices in design patterns, system architecture, cloud-native development, and operational excellence.
- Act as a thought leader, presenting technical concepts and recommendations to diverse teams and senior leadership.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement, learning, and collaboration—setting high standards for code quality, reliability, and maintainability.
- Operational Excellence
- Drive observability (logging, monitoring, tracing) strategies that ensure proactive detection of issues in compute, storage, networking, and auth layers.
- Define and track service-level objectives (SLOs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the availability, performance, and cost efficiency of platform services.
- Own complex incident resolution, guiding teams on root-cause analysis and ensuring continuous feedback loops to improve system resilience.
What You’ll Need:
- Experience & Education
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- 8+ years of professional software development experience, including at least 2+ years in a technical leadership or equivalent senior/principal engineering role.
- Technical Expertise
- Deep knowledge of AWS (VPC, EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, RDS/DynamoDB) and cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, service meshes).
- Proven track record of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
- Strong proficiency in one or more programming languages (Go, Python, Java, etc.) and solid understanding of distributed systems design principles.
- Leadership & Collaboration
- Demonstrated ability to drive large-scale cross-functional initiatives, collaborate effectively with stakeholders, and balance business priorities with technical constraints.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, including executives, product managers, and junior engineers.
- Problem-Solving & Innovation
- History of devising creative solutions to complex infrastructure and platform challenges.
- Passion for continuous improvement, optimizing cloud resource utilization, developer experience, and operational excellence.
- Security & Compliance
- Familiarity with security standards and compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA, etc.) relevant to financial services or regulated industries.