Principal Software Engineer, Builder Tools

The Role

We are looking for an innovative and entrepreneurial Principal Software Engineer to join our Builder Tools engineering organization.  In this role, you will have the opportunity to directly influence, impact and lead the technical strategy and architecture of our next generation internal developer platform in an AI-first SDLC. Your work will elevate developer experience by enabling SoFi engineers with AI enabled development practices and tooling. You will have the opportunity to define and solve challenging problems in a fast-paced, highly collaborative and innovative organization. The ideal candidate will be a thought leader in the Developer Tooling domain, mentor, and team player who is hands-on in driving solutions from inception to implementation, and enabling organizational change and adoption with a strong drive for customer success. 

What You’ll Do:

• Technical leadership - Provide thought leadership for the technical architecture, design, and delivery for AI enabled tools across the SDLC including plan, code, test, build, deploy, observe and remediate.
• Strategic Partnership  - Serve as a key strategic technical advisor to leadership, influencing roadmap, participating in planning sessions, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.
• Innovate - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive innovation and advancements in AI assisted developer productivity flows.
• Operational Excellence - Be a subject matter expert, role model practitioner across the developer tooling domain including operational excellence. Drive observability strategy and practices, including SLOs, and guiding teams on critical incident resolution, root-cause analysis and remediation.
• Mentor - Collaborate with engineers across the Platform organization, provide mentorship, and expertise to enhance the overall technical capabilities of teams.
• Continuous Improvement - Contribute to creating a culture of continuous learning, data-driven decisions and improvements. Proactively identify and manage risks.
• Collaborate – Build strong working relationships with coworkers, cross-organizational leaders, including engineering managers and product managers.
• Influence - Be a change agent influencing and scaling the adoption of AI-enabled developer tooling and best practices across the engineering organization.

What You’ll Need:

• Education - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience - 10+ years of professional software development experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership role. 
• Domain  Expertise - Deep expertise in AI enabled developer productivity,  building Internal Developer Platforms and applications leveraging LLMs, engineering excellence metrics (e.g., DORA, SPACE), build systems for JVM ecosystem (e.g., Gradle, Bazel), and CI/CD systems (e.g., Gitlab, BuildKite, ArgoCD).
• Technical Expertise - Experience developing in a cloud environment (AWS), using containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), cloud-native technologies and service meshes (e.g., Istio, Envoy). 
• Innovation - Proven track record devising and launching creative solutions to developer experience challenges.
• Design and Problem solving - Strong understanding of software design principles, and distributed systems architecture.
• Coding Skills - Proven proficiency shipping enterprise applications in one or more programming languages (Go, Python, Java, Kotlin, etc.)
• Communication and Collaboration - Exceptional verbal and written communication, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences at varying levels, including executives, cross-functional managers, and engineers.
• Project Leadership - Ability to own, manage and deliver complex projects from scoping through launch. Experience leading Agile development practices.
• Security and Compliance (Preferred) - Familiarity with security standards, compliance (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA) and risk management frameworks relevant to financial and regulated industries.