Principal Engineer

at SoFi

Switzerland - Lucerne

Who we are:

Shape a brighter financial future with us.

Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance.

We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.

About the role
We are looking for a Principal Engineer with experience in the design and operations of multi-channel white-labeled platforms. In this role you will lead the design and evolution of our platform to support the needs of both on-prem and hosted customers. Your influence will span across teams, projects and locations, shaping both our technical direction as well as how our teams build and operate software systems.

You will be responsible for defining frontend architecture standards, guiding engineering teams, and ensuring that user-facing platforms are robust, maintainable, secure, and future-proof. You will work closely with product management, UX, backend architects, and delivery teams to translate business and user needs into elegant technical solutions.

You will proactively identify the problems to solve and advocate for the right organization priorities. This role is inherently cross-functional and you will work closely with engineering, product, risk, compliance, data, legal, and executive teams to define and execute on technical strategy. You’ll face and solve a wide range of challenges: technical, product, and operational, shaping your personal growth and career along the way.

This is a senior, hands-on architecture role combining strategic design responsibility with deep technical execution.

What you'll do

Define and evolve the frontend architecture across web and mobile (web-based) platforms.
Collaborate with other engineering leaders in the evolution of the digital platform architecture.
Build that deliver engineering efficiency and standardization of non-functional requirements
Be a technical advisor to the Director of Engineering, weighing in on a variety of topics concerning the evolution of our platform.
Build as an exemplary practitioner: you will get to be hands-on developing software, and set a high quality standard for teams to follow.
Define the right boundaries, APIs, and integrations between our teams and with our clients and partners to set us up for technical and business success.
Experience operating, supporting and running software in production environments
Experience architecting the distribution of SDKs, libraries and components to other engineering teams.
Solve complex engineering problems endemic to high-availability, low-latency, scalable distributed systems.
Execute large-scale projects, leading design, planning, and execution across multiple teams to drive technical directions and product outcomes.
Proactively identify broader problems and opportunities. Anticipate and design the next generation of our systems and products.
Raise the quality of our engineering teams: you will identify opportunities and advocate for improvements to the way we write software, our approach testing and quality, and shape the habits and processes of highly effective teams.
Mentor and coach to individuals and teams across the company. Steward engineering communities, fostering design collaboration and mindshare.
Articulate how technical architecture and team structure interact, provide input to the right organization structure to deliver on our engineer goals.
Strategic advisor to leadership, representing technical strategy to business and executive stakeholders, and participating in strategic planning.
Continuously drives improvement, new practices and operational excellence initiatives across the department (e.g. multiple groups).
Raises the quality of department and products. Be able to stand up processes, mechanisms, or tools to improve engineering excellence, operations, and quality of our technology.
Take initiative and produce timely results in a fast-paced and sometimes ambiguous environment.

What you'll need

10+ years programming experience, mastery of software development independent of language
Advanced expertise in designing frontend platforms including mobile, web, SDKs and micro-frontends
Advanced expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems, applications, databases, and workflows.
Ability to effectively translate product and UX concepts into scalable technical solutions.
Demonstrated experience with continuous delivery principles and techniques: you’ve built systems with layered test automation that is always safe for automated releases to production, enabling a great, low-cycle time developer experience.
A high standard for what “great” looks like, and experience continuously improving legacy systems to reach it.
Strong judgment, experience recognizing and driving out critical decisions in a balanced and pragmatic way.
Experience building systems with public cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, Spanish a plus.
Ability to lead and influence technical direction across multiple teams.
Experience working in teams distributed across time zones and willingness to adapt working hours at times.

Technology requirements

Deep experience in ReactJS
Experience with Java and NodeJS
Strong understanding of web technologies and standards:

Browser internals and performance optimization
Security best practices (XSS, CSRF, auth flows, secure storage, etc.)
API integration (REST, GraphQL)
JavaScript / TypeScript
HTML5, CSS3, responsive design
Modern build and tooling ecosystems (Webpack, Vite, npm/yarn/pnpm, etc.)
Mobile native/hybrid development (ReactNative, Cordova, Swift, Kotlin, Kotlin Multiplatform)

Compensation and Benefits

The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.

To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page!

SoFi provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law.

The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

New York applicants: Notice of Employee Rights

SoFi is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, SoFi offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email accommodations@sofi.com.

Due to insurance coverage issues, we are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii or Alaska at this time.

Internal Employees

If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open roles.