Senior Staff Data Engineer

at SoFi

CA - San Francisco, UT - Salt Lake, WA - Seattle

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.

SoFi is seeking an experienced and motivated Senior Staff Data Engineer to be the technical leader of our Data Engineering group within the SoFi Data Platform(SDP) division. The mission of the SDP division is to activate data throughout SoFi, enabling the creation of personalized and delightful experiences for our members.

The Role:

In this role, you will have the opportunity to directly impact, influence and lead the direction and architecture of our next gen AI powered SoFi Data Platform(SDP), and elevate data reliability through AI enabled workflows, tooling and practices. You will get the chance to lead, define, and take on complex and interesting problems as part of a fast-paced, highly collaborative organization. The ideal candidate will be a mentor, technical leader and a team player who is hands-on and comfortable driving solutions from initial architecture to implementation and adoption with a strong sense of ownership and drive for delivery.

What You’ll Do:

Technical Leadership & Strategy: As a technical leader, you will be at the heart of SoFi’s data platform providing primary technical authority and strategic guidance to the data engineering group.
Architectural Excellence: Lead the architecture and delivery of large-scale, high-performance data pipelines and processing frameworks. Design scalable data models that support analytics, AI/ML and real-time data needs.
Platform Innovation: Drive the adoption of cloud-native technologies, automation frameworks and reusable components that improve development velocity and system reliability across SDP.
System Optimization: Drive org-wide initiatives to improve data reliability, cost-efficiency, and latency. Design solutions that scale horizontally and vertically to handle ever-growing datasets.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with business stakeholders, product and engineering leads to align the data roadmap with SoFi’s business objectives.
Governance & Security: Lead the implementation of sophisticated data privacy, security, and compliance frameworks. Enforce data governance policies and practices to maintain data integrity in a highly regulated environment.
Mentorship: Provide deep technical coaching and mentorship to Staff and Senior data engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, rigorous testing, and engineering excellence.
Workforce Development: Contribute to hiring and training efforts to build a skilled and motivated data engineering workforce. Lead the interview process for senior-level talent and design onboarding programs that accelerate engineering productivity.
On-Call Support: Be part of an on-call support rotation to support the critical production systems.

What You'll Need:

Education: A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Experience: Over 12 years of experience in data engineering and analytics, with at least 4 years in a staff-level or higher capacity. A proven track record of successfully leading enterprise-wide data modernization efforts.
Tech Stack Mastery: Mastery of the modern data stack: Snowflake / Python / SQL / GitLab / AWS / Airflow/ AI tools like Claude code/Cursor. Understanding and implementation experience of AI agents is a plus.
Cloud Architecture: Expert-level proficiency in relational and cloud database platforms (Snowflake, Redshift, or GCP) and distributed processing frameworks (Hadoop, Spark, or Kafka).
Strategic Thinking: Thorough knowledge and passion for data modeling (Kimball/Data Vault), database design, and data architecture principles. Ability to simplify complex, ambiguous issues into actionable technical plans.
Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and senior management.

Domain Knowledge: Deep experience in a highly regulated and governed sector; experience in the Fintech industry is highly advantageous.

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.