Senior Staff Data Engineer

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.