Senior Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Experience
About The Position
SoFi's AI Platform team builds the foundation that enables engineers across the company to use AI to work faster and more safely. The AI Developer Experience (AI DevEx) team is responsible for interactive coding strategy and its underlying infrastructure, including AI economics, coding harnesses and harness vending, an evaluation platform, the AI Gateway, and intelligent model routing. As a founding Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will serve as the technical lead and subject matter expert for AI DevEx across AI Platform. You will set architecture, shape interactive coding strategy, and lead work across Autonomous Coding, CI/CD, Code Factory, and customer engineering teams. The role includes setting technical direction and roadmaps, leading cross-team initiatives, resolving complex architectural issues, evaluating AI tools and models, establishing architecture and production standards, responding to high-severity incidents, and mentoring senior and staff engineers. The role requires a bachelor's degree and at least four years of experience, or a master's degree and at least three years of experience, in software engineering, computer science, or a related technical field. Candidates should bring technical leadership across multi-team software initiatives, experience with distributed systems and platform infrastructure, hands-on experience with LLM-based architectures and AI development tools, and experience with model evaluation pipelines, AI gateways or proxies, or dynamic routing. The position also calls for analyzing infrastructure economics and telemetry, strong communication and cross-functional leadership, and commitment to security, privacy, and maintainable engineering practices. Engineers are expected to use AI tools responsibly, critically review AI-generated code and architecture, comply with data-handling and security protocols, and share effective AI development workflows and evaluation guardrails. SoFi states that it cannot accommodate remote work from Hawaii, Alaska, or Puerto Rico. Benefits information is available on SoFi's Benefits page; specific benefits are not listed in this posting.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree plus at least 4 years of experience, or master’s degree plus at least 3 years of experience, in software engineering, computer science, or a related technical field.
- Proven technical leadership on software initiatives spanning multiple teams and complex distributed architectures.
- Strong system design capability with large-scale, high-availability distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and cross-domain APIs.
- Hands-on experience building with LLM-based architectures, model APIs, and AI-assisted development tools such as coding agents, developer harnesses, prompt/context evaluation, and tool integration.
- Hands-on experience designing or operating model evaluation pipelines, AI proxies or gateways, or dynamic routing systems.
- Ability to analyze infrastructure unit economics, capacity trade-offs, and operational telemetry.
- Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a record of driving technical alignment across engineering squads and leadership.
- Commitment to engineering best practices, security guardrails, data privacy, and maintainable software design.
- Ability to use AI tools responsibly, rigorously review AI-generated code and architecture, follow data-handling and security protocols, and share effective AI development practices.
Nice To Haves
- Experience designing or scaling internal developer platforms (IDPs) and developer tooling at enterprise scale.
- Practical exposure to FinOps frameworks for tracking and optimizing cloud or AI compute spend.
- Direct experience developing autonomous agentic workflows or deep integrations with engineering development lifecycle tools.
- Background in financial technology, banking platforms, or regulated engineering environments.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive architecture for the enterprise AI Gateway, model routing, automated evaluation platform, and harness vending to support interactive and autonomous workflows across business units.
- Identify developer productivity bottlenecks, develop a 12–24 month technical roadmap, and execute high-impact design and build initiatives.
- Architect cost models, metering systems, telemetry, and adaptive routing policies to balance model accuracy, latency, and operational spending.
- Plan and technically lead initiatives across engineering teams and establish shared interfaces and platform contracts with Autonomous Coding, CI/CD pipelines, and Code Factory.
- Identify and remediate root causes of architectural bottlenecks involving latency, throughput, state management, and dependencies across distributed systems.
- Assess emerging AI tooling and foundational models and recommend vendor-neutral, future-proof integration patterns.
- Lead department-level technical planning, establish architectural RFC standards, and facilitate design reviews across product areas.
- Set production standards for resilience, testing, and deployment; coordinate responses to high-severity incidents and lead post-incident reviews focused on preventing root causes.
- Coach and develop Senior (IC3) and Staff (IC4) engineers, fostering engineering craft, ownership, and psychological safety.
- Use AI tools responsibly for prototyping, architecture exploration, and ramp-up; critically review AI-generated work and uphold testing, safety, maintainability, and data-security requirements.
- Share effective AI development workflows, specification templates, and evaluation guardrails to elevate team productivity.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
