Senior Staff Researcher, SoFi
$163.2-280.5k
Eligible for a bonus and long term incentives
Mobile & online personal finance services
Job no longer available
Mobile & online personal finance services
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$163.2-280.5k
Eligible for a bonus and long term incentives
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help people reach financial independence to realize their ambitions.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of experience in applied product or design research, or a combination of advanced degrees (Master’s or Ph.D.) with 8+ years of experience
- Expertise in leading research across multiple product areas and workstreams, with demonstrated success in addressing ambiguous, complex challenges
- Command of a wide range of research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, with mastery in 1-2 areas
- Proven ability to influence senior leadership and align cross-functional teams on strategic priorities
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to deliver insights in engaging and actionable ways for diverse audiences
- Strong technical acumen and experience with advanced research tools (e.g., Qualtrics, Snowflake, SQL)
- Experience creating scalable research frameworks, assets, and artifacts (e.g., personas, journey maps)
- Bonus: Deep understanding of personal finance domains
What the job involves
- Join our impactful team at SoFi as a Senior Staff Researcher, a senior-level position with the opportunity to drive research strategies that shape our product, design, and business decisions
- As a trusted advisor and influential leader, you will take ownership of high-profile, complex research initiatives spanning multiple product areas and workstreams
- You will partner closely with design, product, marketing, and engineering leaders to ensure we build solutions that prioritize our members’ needs and deliver meaningful outcomes
- In this role, you’ll plan and lead strategic, cross-functional research initiatives that address ambiguous, large-scale challenges
- You are a principle-based problem solver with a mastery of research methodologies, enabling you to guide teams toward innovative, user-centered solutions
- You have a demonstrated ability to influence leadership, set strategic priorities, and foster collaboration across organizational boundaries
- At SoFi, you’ll become part of a new kind of finance company whose ambition is to help our members achieve financial independence and reach their goals
- We aim to be at the center of our members’ financial lives, and to help every member get their money right
- To deliver that we have created a suite of products and services including credit score monitoring, banking, investing, credit cards, personal loans, student loans, home loans and more
- Lead complex research projects: Drive end-to-end research initiatives that address large-scale, ambiguous member needs and inform strategies across product areas
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with design, product, engineering, and marketing teams to prioritize research, align on objectives, and integrate findings into roadmaps
- Communicate actionable insights: Deliver clear, impactful presentations to stakeholders and leadership, directly influencing priorities and decision-making
- Develop reusable tools: Create durable artifacts like personas, journey maps, and frameworks that enable teams to consistently apply research insights
- Mentor researchers: Provide guidance to team members, foster skill development, and play a key role in hiring and onboarding
- Enhance alignment: Build trust with stakeholders, proactively aligning goals and ensuring shared accountability for outcomes
- Drive organizational impact: Expand the influence of research across product areas by identifying opportunities, standardizing practices, and fostering a user-centric culture
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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 27 more jobs at SoFi