Principal Engineer, Digital Identity

About the role

You will be the technical leader for Digital Identity at SoFi under the Sofi Technology Solution Group: the platform group that powers identity, authorization, and entitlements for every product and every member across the company. Digital Identity runs Tier-0 infrastructure: the highest criticality rating at SoFi. Every product line—banking, lending, investing, credit cards, crypto—depends on these platforms to know who a member is, what they're entitled to, and what they're authorized to do. When these platforms are down, SoFi is down.

You'll define the technical strategy for this group. You'll architect solutions for complex, ambiguous problems: multi-person access patterns, cross-organizational platform convergence, and data integrity at financial-services scale. You'll build the engineering processes and culture that let a lean team operate Tier-0 infrastructure with confidence. And you'll push the boundaries of how we build, leveraging AI to accelerate development, prototype faster, and experiment with approaches that would have been impractical two years ago.

Responsibilities

• Platform Technical Strategy: Own the technical strategy across all Tier-0 platforms spanning identity resolution, entitlement management, and fine-grained authorization. Set the architectural direction, execute and lead designs, and ensure the platforms evolve as a coherent system.
• Complex Authorization Architecture: Design the unified platform architecture for multi-person financial authorization scenarios (business, family, custodial contexts) at scale, including consistent access models, compliance-grade audit trails, and enforcement of regulatory requirements.
• Cross-Organization Platform Convergence: Lead the architectural vision for convergence across multiple technology organizations with overlapping identity and authorization infrastructure, balancing shared platform primitives with product-line flexibility.
• Operational Excellence & Data Integrity: Architect verification and reconciliation systems for Tier-0 financial platforms, including automated integrity checks, drift detection, and self-healing mechanisms. Establish operational processes, incident response standards, and reliability practices.
• Engineering Culture & Team Uplift: Raise the bar for the team by establishing rigorous design review processes, defining engineering standards, mentoring senior ICs into technical leaders, and creating feedback loops to turn incidents into prevention.
• Strategic Investment Identification: Identify high-leverage technical investments, including emerging patterns in authorization, AI, and infrastructure, to adopt before the business requests them.

Requirements

• Distributed systems architecture at scale: Experience designing and shipping platforms that other engineering teams depend on, with deep understanding of failure modes in event-driven systems, eventual consistency, and cross-service data integrity.
• Technical leadership with accountability: Experience building systems that prove their correctness through reconciliation mechanisms, audit trails, integrity guarantees, and automated verification.
• AI fluency and innovation: Active use of AI to build, prototype, and experiment, with the ability to articulate where AI accelerates engineering and where it introduces risk. Push teams to adopt AI-native approaches as a competitive advantage.
• Group-level influence and execution: Proven track record driving technical strategy across multiple teams, navigating ambiguity, and representing technical direction to peer groups and executive leadership.
• Engineering culture builder: Experience establishing processes, standards, and practices that improve team effectiveness, including design review rigor, operational readiness, on-call excellence, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Ownership of outcomes: Measure success by enabled outcomes (e.g., products shipped, risks eliminated, teams unblocked) rather than the complexity of what you built.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building identity & authorization platforms, especially in multi-tenant or consumer-facing contexts, with familiarity in relationship-based access control models or identity federation infrastructure.
• Experience in financial services or regulated industries where compliance, audit trails, and data integrity are architectural requirements.
• Track record of platform convergence: merging or unifying infrastructure across acquisitions, subsidiaries, or organizations with different technical stacks.

What This Isn't

This is not a role for someone who wants to write code in a corner. You'll spend significant time on architecture, cross-team alignment, design reviews, and mentorship. While you will write code to drive credibility, the highest-leverage output is the technical direction you set, the engineering culture you build, and the engineers you develop.

Why This Role?

• Scope: Digital Identity is horizontal infrastructure. Every product at SoFi depends on your platforms, and your design decisions affect millions of members.
• Hard problems: Tackle multi-person financial authorization, cross-org platform convergence, and data integrity at Tier-0 scale—greenfield architecture for a company-wide platform.
• Visibility: Tier-0 means executives know when you ship and when you don’t. Impact is direct and measurable.
• Build + Lead: Balance deep distributed systems work with group-level technical leadership. Architect systems and build engineering culture in equal measure.
• AI-forward engineering: Help define how AI changes platform engineering, using it to move faster, experiment more, and build systems that would have been impractical with traditional approaches.

Pay

The base pay range for this role will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.

Benefits

To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page.