Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

SoFi•Seattle, WA

10h•$198,400 - $341,000

About The Position

You will be the technical leader for Digital Identity at SoFi under the Sofi Technology Solution Group: 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: designed and shipped platforms that other engineering teams depend on.
Understanding of failure modes of event-driven systems, eventual consistency, and cross-service data integrity.
Experience making hard tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and latency in production.
Technical leadership with accountability: designed systems that prove they're correct through reconciliation mechanisms, audit trails, integrity guarantees, and automated verification.
AI fluency and innovation: actively use AI to build, prototype, and experiment; integrated AI-assisted development into workflow; can articulate where AI accelerates engineering and where it introduces risk.
Group-level influence and execution: driven technical strategy across multiple teams; navigated ambiguity; represented technical direction to peer groups and senior/executive leadership.
Engineering culture builder: established processes, standards, and practices that made entire teams more effective; care about design review rigor, operational readiness, on-call excellence, and mentoring senior engineers.
Ownership of outcomes, not just systems: measured work by what it enabled (products shipped, risks eliminated, teams unblocked) and not by the complexity of what was 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.
Track record of platform convergence: merging or unifying infrastructure across acquisitions, subsidiaries, or organizations with different technical stacks.

Responsibilities

Define the technical strategy for the Digital Identity group, setting architectural direction, executing and leading designs, and ensuring platforms evolve as a coherent system.
Architect unified platform solutions for complex authorization scenarios involving multiple people interacting with shared financial resources, ensuring consistent access models, compliance-grade audit trails, and enforcement of regulatory requirements.
Lead the architectural vision for cross-organization platform convergence, creating shared platform primitives that multiple organizations can consume while preserving flexibility for product lines.
Architect verification and reconciliation systems to ensure the correctness of Tier-0 financial platforms, including automated integrity checks, drift detection, and self-healing mechanisms.
Establish operational processes, incident response standards, and reliability practices for Tier-0 infrastructure.
Raise the bar for software development by establishing rigorous design review processes, defining engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and creating feedback loops for incident prevention.
Identify high-leverage technical investments for platform evolution, including missing capabilities and emerging patterns in authorization and AI.
Spend significant time on architecture, cross-team alignment, design reviews, and mentorship.
Write code and drive credibility with technical depth.
Set technical direction, build engineering culture, and develop engineers.