Senior Staff Software Engineer, Commercial Banking

SoFi•Seattle, WA

About The Position

SoFi is launching a brand-new commercial banking product — and we need a Senior Staff Engineer to be its technical backbone. Commercial Banking is SoFi's entry into institutional commercial banking. We're building the infrastructure that lets large institutional clients in crypto, fintech, and enterprise finance manage their money at SoFi — real-time payments, multi-account treasury management, and a closed-loop settlement network that operates 24/7/365. The systems you design will handle real institutional money from day one. The network you help architect — SEN (SoFi Exchange Network) — could become the default settlement rail for the industry. As the Senior Staff Engineer on the Commercial Banking team, you'll be the technical leader the team looks to for the hardest problems — system design, API contracts, payment correctness, performance, and reliability. You'll set the technical bar, make architectural decisions that stick, and write the code that proves them out. This is a hands-on role: you'll be deep in the codebase while also shaping the direction for the engineers around you.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a sustained track record of technical leadership on complex, production-critical systems.
Deep distributed systems expertise — you can design services end-to-end, reason about consistency and ordering guarantees, and make pragmatic tradeoffs between correctness, availability, and latency.
Hands-on mastery of JVM-based stacks (Kotlin or Java, Spring Boot) and modern infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines).
Strong API design sensibility — you've designed APIs that external consumers depend on, and you understand the long-term cost of getting contracts wrong.
Experience with stateful workflow systems — you've built or operated long-running, retryable, idempotent workflows in production.
Proven ability to lead without authority — you influence technical direction through the quality of your ideas, your code, and your ability to bring people along.
Excellent communication skills — you can write clear technical design documents, explain complex systems to non-technical stakeholders, and make your reasoning legible to the team.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice To Haves

Experience building financial systems — payments, ledger, treasury, banking, or fintech where auditability, correctness, and regulatory compliance are table stakes.
Experience building real-time payment systems (FedWire, FedNow, RTP, ACH origination) or settlement networks.
Background in commercial or institutional banking (treasury management, FBO/omnibus accounts, correspondent banking).
Experience with crypto-adjacent financial infrastructure — custodian banking, exchange settlement, stablecoin operations.
Familiarity with AML/KYB compliance workflows and transaction monitoring in a regulated banking environment.
Experience building developer-facing products — API gateways, developer portals, sandbox environments, webhook infrastructure.
Prior work with workflow orchestration engines (Temporal, Cadence, Step Functions) for long-running stateful processes.
Experience with event-driven architectures — Kafka, event sourcing, or CQRS patterns in high-throughput systems.

Responsibilities

Architect and Build
Own the technical architecture for Commercial Banking's core systems — payment orchestration, client onboarding workflows, API Gateway, real-time settlement, and the services that power the client-facing experience.
Design and implement the SoFi Exchange Network (SEN) — a real-time, 24/7/365 closed-loop payment network enabling instant settlement between SoFi commercial clients.
Build the client onboarding orchestrator: a stateful workflow engine that provisions entities, bank accounts, entitlements, payment rails, limits, and pricing — with retry, rollback, and idempotency guarantees.
Design enterprise-grade identity, RBAC, and maker/checker approval systems that support complex organizational structures with scoped account access, per-rail permissions, and configurable payment limits.
Define API contracts that institutional clients will integrate against — getting the abstractions, error models, and versioning right from day one.
Architect a sandbox environment that realistically simulates every payment rail, enabling clients to build and test their integrations with confidence.
Set the Technical Standard
Establish system design patterns, coding standards, and engineering best practices for the Commercial Banking codebase.
Drive technical decisions on data modeling, service boundaries, consistency guarantees, and failure handling across payment workflows where correctness is non-negotiable.
Own observability strategy — structured logging, distributed tracing, alerting, and dashboards that give the team confidence in production.
Lead technical design reviews and code reviews. Raise the quality bar and make it stick through example, not just feedback.
Identify and address technical debt proactively — knowing when to take shortcuts for speed and when to invest in the right long-term solution.
Lead Through Influence
Be the go-to technical leader on the team — the person engineers come to when they're stuck on a design problem, a performance issue, or a tricky integration.
Mentor engineers at all levels. Help senior engineers grow toward staff-level thinking; help mid-level engineers develop stronger system design instincts.
Partner with engineering management to shape the technical roadmap, estimate complexity, and sequence work for maximum impact.
Drive cross-team technical alignment with other engineering teams at SoFi — working across identity, entitlements, accounts, payments, and core banking systems to ensure clean integration points.
Represent the team's technical perspective in discussions with Product, Compliance, Risk, and Operations — translating business requirements into sound engineering decisions.
Make It Production-Ready
Design systems that handle real money with the reliability and correctness that institutional clients demand — every transaction must be accounted for, every failure mode handled.
Build for scale from day one — systems that work for early clients but are architected to support hundreds without rework.
Own the technical side of client go-live: integration health checks, performance validation, monitoring readiness, and production cutover.
Drive incident response and post-mortems. Build a culture where production issues are learning opportunities, not blame events.