Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

SoFi•Seattle, WA

About The Position

You will be the technical leader for Digital Identity at SoFi: the platform group that powers identity, authorization, and entitlements for every product and every member across the company. Digital Identity runs Tier-0 infrastructure: the highest criticality rating at SoFi. Every product line, banking, lending, investing, credit cards, crypto depends on these platforms to know who a member is, what they're entitled to, and what they're authorized to do. When these platforms are down, SoFi is down.You'll define the technical strategy for this group. You'll architect solutions for complex, ambiguous problems: multi-person access patterns, cross-organizational platform convergence, and data integrity at financial-services scale. You'll build the engineering processes and culture that let a lean team operate Tier-0 infrastructure with confidence. And you'll push the boundaries of how we build, leveraging AI to accelerate development, prototype faster, and experiment with approaches that would have been impractical two years ago.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Platform Technical Strategy: Digital Identity operates multiple Tier-0 platforms spanning identity resolution, entitlement management, and fine-grained authorization. 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.
Complex Authorization Architecture: SoFi is expanding into scenarios where multiple people interact with shared financial resources: across business, family, and custodial contexts. 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. This is one platform problem with many product surfaces.
Cross-Organization Platform Convergence: SoFi operates and integrates with multiple technology organizations with overlapping identity and authorization infrastructure. You'll lead the architectural vision for convergence: a shared platform primitives that multiple organizations consume while preserving the flexibility each product line needs. This requires navigating competing priorities, different technical stacks, and organizational boundaries.
Operational Excellence & Data Integrity: Tier-0 financial platforms demand more than uptime. You'll architect the verification and reconciliation systems that prove these platforms are correct: automated integrity checks, drift detection, and self-healing mechanisms. You'll establish the operational processes, incident response standards, and reliability practices that let the team ship with confidence and sleep at night.
Engineering Culture & Team Uplift: You'll raise the bar for how this team builds software. That means establishing rigorous design review processes, defining engineering standards that compound over time, mentoring senior ICs into technical leaders, and creating the feedback loops that turn incidents into prevention. You're not just the best engineer on the team: you're the reason the whole team gets better.
Strategic Investment Identification: You won't just execute on the roadmap handed to you. 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.

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