Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Experience

SoFi • Seattle, WA

5d • $153,600 - $264,000

About The Position

SoFi’s AI Platform team builds foundational systems that help engineers ship faster and more safely using AI. The AI Developer Experience team owns the company’s interactive coding strategy and supporting infrastructure, including AI economics, coding harnesses and harness vending, an evaluation platform, the enterprise AI Gateway, and intelligent model routing. The founding Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership, own major platform systems, establish engineering standards, and work with Autonomous Coding, CI/CD, Code Factory, and other engineering teams.

The role involves designing, building, and operating production-grade platform components; creating telemetry and cost-allocation mechanisms for AI usage; planning and coordinating technical execution; guiding design decisions; and maintaining operational excellence. The engineer will work directly with internal developers to improve adoption and the user experience, maintain a 6-to-12-month technical vision, and mentor teammates.

Candidates should have a bachelor’s degree and 3–4 years of experience, or a master’s degree and 2–3 years of experience, in software engineering, computer science, or a related field. The role requires advanced expertise in a modern backend language, distributed-systems judgment, technical leadership, hands-on experience with AI-assisted developer tooling or LLM systems, cloud and CI/CD experience, and strong communication skills. Engineers are expected to use AI responsibly, validate generated code with automated tests, protect sensitive data, and share effective tooling and guardrails.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree plus 3–4 years of experience, or master’s degree plus 2–3 years of experience, in software engineering, computer science, or a related field.
• Advanced programming expertise in at least one modern backend language such as Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, or Scala.
• Proven distributed systems expertise and sound judgment regarding security, concurrency, fault tolerance, horizontal scaling, and idempotence.
• Track record of technical leadership guiding feature delivery, cross-functional alignment, and architecture on production platforms.
• Hands-on experience developing with or building AI-assisted developer tooling and LLM-based systems, such as coding assistants, autonomous agents, prompt engineering, or tool execution frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP cloud infrastructure, containerization, modern CI/CD pipelines, and operational on-call service ownership.
• Product-oriented engineering mindset, including treating internal developers as customers and measuring success through adoption and user sentiment.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including drafting structured technical design documents and presenting options to diverse stakeholders.
• Ability to use AI tools responsibly and uphold security, safety, data governance, and testing standards.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience building or operating LLM evaluation pipelines, model proxies, or semantic request-routing layers.
• Experience engineering internal developer platforms, developer tooling, or CLI workflows.
• Experience with cost telemetry, usage-based metering, or FinOps instrumentation.
• Background in fintech or adjacent environments with strict data compliance and security regulations.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end design, development, and operation of foundational AI Gateway, model routing, evaluation platform, and harness-vending systems.
• Develop usage telemetry, cost allocation, and chargeback mechanisms to provide visibility into AI spending per developer.
• Plan feature architecture and implementation, parallelize work across teammates, and align dependencies with product and engineering leaders.
• Facilitate design reviews, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and align technical outcomes across SoFi engineering.
• Define coding conventions, automated patterns, and architectural standards for maintainable and extensible software.
• Automate build, test, and deployment workflows; help resolve production incidents and address root causes through post-incident actions.
• Maintain a 6-to-12-month technical vision, anticipate system growth, prioritize architectural hygiene, and make build-versus-adopt decisions.
• Work directly with internal engineering teams to understand developer workflows, encourage adoption of interactive coding tools, and incorporate feedback into system improvements.
• Provide constructive code and design feedback to mentor and develop engineers.
• Use AI tools responsibly to prototype, explore unfamiliar codebases, and accelerate implementation while upholding security and safety standards.
• Critically inspect and validate AI-generated code and support implementations with comprehensive automated tests.
• Follow data governance and security policies and ensure sensitive member data and proprietary assets are not exposed to unapproved tools.
• Establish and share effective harnesses, prompt templates, and operational guardrails.

Benefits

• SoFi describes its benefits as comprehensive and competitive and directs candidates to its Benefits at SoFi page; specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior