Principal Software Engineer, SoFi
Data Platform
$192-330k
+ Bonus & long term incentives
Mobile & online personal finance services
Open for applications
Mobile & online personal finance services
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$192-330k
+ Bonus & long term incentives
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help people reach financial independence to realize their ambitions.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate has experience in distributed systems and scalable data platforms
- Educational Background: A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field is required; an advanced degree is preferred
- Experience: A minimum of 10 years in a pivotal Software/Data Engineering role, with extensive experience in modern data stacks, particularly Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, Kafka, Docker/k8s, and AWS data services
- Strong understanding of data ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and reverse ETL best practices and design principles
- Proven skills in distributed systems architecture and building scalable solutions
- Mastery in Python, Java, and SQL for complex operations within Snowflake and AWS services like DMS, MSK (Kafka), and S3
- Solid experience with Terraform or Cloudformation as IaC solutions
- Strong leadership and communication skills
- Experience working in a collaborative coding environment, refining designs together, working through code reviews, and managing pull requests
- Demonstrated problem-solving capabilities, especially within the context of the modern data stack and experimentation realm
- Exceptional technical communication skills, adept at liaising with both technical peers and diverse stakeholders within a data-driven organization
- Demonstrated ability to lead a team of developers, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and support
Desirable
- Data exploration and analysis experience using SQL/Python/R/Tableau
- Experience with prompt engineering and fine-tuning LLMs
- Contributions to open-source projects
- Experience with data governance and security
- Familiarity with machine learning concepts
- Experience with finance / fintech or enthusiastic to learn and grow in this space
What the job involves
- SoFi is driven by data
- In this role, you will contribute to the long-term success of SoFi's data vision by developing distributed systems and scalable data platforms
- The Data Platform Group supports data use cases across all of SoFi's diverse business units by providing a highly scalable, democratized data platform that empowers teams to ingest, model, and consume data confidently
- Join the Data Platform Group as it refines its vision and establishes industry-leading standards for data lifecycle management, introducing best-in-class architectural components and processes to extract value from disparate data sources
- The success of this team is vital to the company's success, and your contributions will have a highly visible and lasting impact
- As a Principal Engineer, you'll contribute to the team's technical direction by designing innovative solutions to complex business challenges
- You'll collaborate with engineering teams to maximize value for platform consumers, coordinate with squads to align with the Data Platform team's strategy, and provide guidance on testing and deployment strategies
- Leveraging your expertise, you'll explore GenAI to enhance data analysis and decision-making
- You'll mentor team members and represent the team during recruitment and hiring
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand complex business requirements and translate them into scalable, high-impact technical solutions, directly influencing SoFi's data-driven decision-making processes
- Lead architectural design sessions for the Data Platform and its integrations (APIs, services), ensuring solutions are not only technically sound but also aligned with broader business goals and significantly contribute to SoFi's overall data strategy
- Drive the development of advanced features within the Experimentation platform, ensuring modular, efficient, and scalable code structures optimized for the aforementioned stack
- Spearhead rigorous code review processes, underscoring best practices, efficiency, and optimal use of underlying software components unique capabilities and services
- Foster and facilitate internal technical sessions, exploring nuances of AWS data services like DMS, MSK (Kafka) , and S3, and sharing best practices for integration with the broader data stack
- Provide technical leadership in evaluating and adopting emerging technologies within the modern data stack, ensuring SoFi remains at the forefront of data engineering innovation
- Drive Operational excellence across the squads and act as a liaison between Data and other organizations. Implement and track operational metrics to measure progress and identify opportunities for further optimization
- Engineer sophisticated data pipelines using dbt, Airflow, and Snowflake, with special emphasis on performance optimization and data integrity using Great Expectations
- Leverage Python and SQL scripting proficiencies for intricate data operations, custom ETL/ELT processes, and sophisticated data transformations across the platform
- Collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to explore and implement GenAI solutions for data analysis, feature engineering, and predictive modeling. Contribute to the development of responsible GenAI practices within the organization, ensuring ethical and unbiased use of AI technologies
- Mentor technical team members in best practices for Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, and AWS services, promoting a culture of technical distinction and innovation
Our take
SoFi started by offering ways for students to secure better financial terms on their loans, and now offers a huge range of personal finance products, including bank accounts, loans, mortgages, investment advice, and investment opportunities. Many customers find they have to go to multiple financial service providers to meet all their finance needs, but SoFi overcomes this issue by putting it all in one place.
Its goal, to cover all the financial bases, sets them apart from many of the traditional banks and even some of their digital competitors, such as Avant, which has chosen to focus on providing credit alternatives. Although it is operating in a competitive market with a lot of big players such as Monzo, Revolut, and Starling, the company has managed to raise huge amounts of funding to support its rapid expansion.
SoFi has focussed on global expansion, moving outside the US, and has made a series of acquisitions to support this - including a Hong Kong-based investment app called 8 Securities. After going public on the New York Stock Exchange via a SPAC merger in June 2021, the company has continued to evolve and release more mission-oriented services into its roster, and strengthened its lending capabilities through a $350 million post-IPO loan. To date, the company has sold over $15 billion in personal loan collateral and continues to strengthen its offering.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jan 2021
$369.9m
LATE VC
May 2019
$500m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $2.7bn
Company benefits
- Comprehensive health, vision, dental, life insurance, and disability benefits
- Generous vacation and holidays
- Paid parental leave for eligible employees
- 401(k) and education on retirement planning
- Tuition reimbursement on approved programs, up to $5,250 per year
- Monthly contribution up to $200 to help you pay off your student loans
- Great health & well-being benefits including: telehealth parental support, subsidized gym program
- Flexible time off
- Fertility and family planning options
- Free financial classes
Company values
- Put our member's interests first – if we take care of our members' interests, it will best serve our interests.
- Run after problems – we must build a culture of people who run after problems in order to ensure we execute with excellence and “things” do not fall through the cracks.
- Embrace diversity, everyone should feel welcome, included and able to contribute – diversity is a differentiator and our team should reflect society. We should continue to encourage and celebrate diversity.
- Get to the truth and make principle-based decisions – we can only make the best decisions if we have the right data, all of the perspectives, and if we align on the guiding principles.
- Make your footprint bigger than your foot – selfless acts are critical to elevate beyond the impact of our collective individual efforts.
- Do the right thing, if you're not sure, do the harder thing – our business is built on trust and integrity, which requires both adhering to the letter of the law and regulations and doing the right thing for the company and our members..
- Set ambitious goals, be gritty, be accountable - we must hold ourselves and others accountable for delivering our business objectives, for our culture, and for our member.
- Take care of other people and help them grow - our people are our greatest differentiator, if we take care of our people, they will take care of our members.
- Iterate, learn, innovate - we are all responsible for innovation and we must embrace data-driven decisions.
- Be SoFi missionaries - our products, our services, our brand, and our business must be durable over the long term to achieve our mission—be a missionary.
- Don’t forget to smile - our ambition is contagious: it makes us smile to see people inside and outside of SoFi succeed.
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Anthony Noto
(CEO)Graduated from the U.S. Military Academy after being a telecommunications officer and captain in the U.S. Army. Has worked as Head of Gobal Telecommunications, Media and Technology at Goldman Sachs, been the COO of Twitter, and also the CFO of the National Football League.
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