Staff Software Engineer, Builder Tools

About the role

SoFi is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the design, implementation, and evolution of our Developer Platform and testing infrastructure critical to enabling autonomous, AI-driven software development. In this role, you will directly shape the architecture and reliability of tools that empower SoFi engineers to build and deliver high-quality solutions safely and at scale. You will partner with cross-functional product and platform teams to raise testing and reliability standards across backend and web applications while operating at the forefront of AI-assisted development. This position involves owning green field initiatives that define how testing, automation, and observability come together in a cloud-native, containerized environment. If you are passionate about building platforms that just work and enabling developers to ship with confidence, this is an opportunity to have significant impact on our engineering organization and our members' financial future.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Provide technical leadership for initiatives in Testing and Reliability, with a focus on integrating AI-driven automation and autonomous testing practices into SoFi's development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to understand requirements and design platform capabilities that are efficient, robust, and developer-friendly, ensuring solutions align with long-term architectural goals.
• Architect and implement solutions that accelerate integration, load, performance, and chaos testing - including the use of AI for automated test generation, selection, and failure analysis - to improve test effectiveness and coverage.
• Deliver software that enables seamless testing and operation of backend systems in cloud-native, containerized, and CI/CD environments, supporting shift-left practices and continuous delivery.
• Research, prototype, and productionize AI/ML tools that enhance developer productivity, test coverage, and test maturity across the engineering organization.
• Lead code reviews, refactoring efforts, and provide constructive feedback to team members, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.
• Champion best practices for code health, test automation, environment stability, and software maintainability, contributing to the evolution of autonomous testing at SoFi.
• Own end-to-end delivery of platform features, from scoping and requirements gathering through design, implementation, testing, and production rollout, ensuring solutions meet reliability and scalability standards.
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to ensure testing tools integrate effectively with service meshes, traffic capture, routing, and playback technologies in complex distributed environments.
• Drive the adoption of API mocking, test tenancy strategies, and observability practices to enable safe, scalable, and repeatable testing across services and teams.
• Develop and maintain high-quality tooling and frameworks that abstract complexity and enable product teams to build and validate features with minimal friction.
• Measure and report on testing metrics and outcomes, using data to drive improvements in test efficiency, reliability, and developer experience.
• Contribute to open source strategies where applicable and represent SoFi in technical communities focused on testing, reliability, and developer platforms.
• Mentor engineers on platform capabilities and support knowledge transfer through documentation, demos, and hands-on collaboration.
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure platform reliability and rapid response to issues affecting testing and production environments.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of software development experience with a strong track record of delivering complex software systems.
• Experience developing in a cloud environment such as AWS, using containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), cloud-native technologies, and service meshes like Istio or Envoy.
• Strong understanding of software design principles and distributed systems architecture to build scalable and maintainable platforms.
• Proven programming skills in languages such as Java, Kotlin, Python, or Go for developing enterprise-scale systems.
• Expertise in automated testing strategies, testing in production, test tenancy, API mocking, traffic capture, routing, and playback technologies.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to think strategically about Testing and Reliability domains within a large organization.
• Demonstrated ability to manage and deliver projects from scoping through launch, including stakeholder communication and cross-team coordination.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills with experience operating successfully in cross-functional, matrixed team environments.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/ML tooling for code or test generation and automation within development workflows.
• Background in building or operating developer platforms, internal tools, or platform engineering practices.
• Familiarity with financial services domain challenges and regulatory considerations related to testing and reliability.
• Contributions to open source projects or public speaking at technical events related to testing, reliability, or cloud-native technologies.

Practical notes

• Work location is limited to California (San Francisco) or Washington (Seattle) as specified in the key facts.
• This role is full-time and eligible for SoFi's standard benefits and compensation programs.
• Applicants must comply with SoFi's employment eligibility and authorization requirements without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or similar protected statuses.