--- title: 'Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform — Data Trust & AI Context at SoFi' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-data-platform-data-trust-ai-context-sofi-seattle-hnv99x73a3zc' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-29' --- # Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform — Data Trust & AI Context at SoFi - **Company:** SoFi - **Location:** Seattle, WA / Cottonwood Heights, UT / San Francisco, CA - **Posted:** 2026-10-23 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29 - **Apply:** https://sofi.com/careers/job/8037984003?gh_jid=8037984003 ## Job description [Employee Applicant Privacy Notice](https://www.sofi.com/sofi-employee-applicant-privacy-notice/) Who we are: Shape a brighter financial future with us. Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world. The Role: SoFi’s ability to deliver trusted member experiences, manage risk, meet regulatory obligations, and scale enterprise AI depends on data that is reliable, governed, understandable, and available when it is needed. As a Principal Software Engineer in the Data Platform Group, you will provide hands-on technical leadership within the Data Trust pillar. Working alongside the Senior Manager and other Principal Engineers, you will design, build, and operate the distributed systems and reusable platform primitives that make data quality, privacy, metadata, lineage, access, and reliability enforceable by construction across the enterprise. Your work will span three connected areas: establishing shared Data Trust capabilities, raising the reliability of data across batch and low-latency environments, and applying those foundations to a semantic context layer for trusted analytics and AI. By making business meaning, ownership, provenance, quality, freshness, and access policies machine-readable, you will help end users and AI systems work from consistent, governed context. This is an individual contributor role with broad organizational impact. You will personally contribute code, prototypes, architecture, and operational improvements while setting technical direction across engineering, data, security, privacy, legal, risk, analytics, and product teams. You will build reusable enterprise capabilities and reference patterns that partner teams can adopt, while domain teams retain ownership of their application-specific use cases and serving paths. What you will own: - Data Trust architecture and strategy: Define and execute the technical direction for data contracts, metadata and catalog modernization, lineage, data quality, privacy, and access controls. Translate business, regulatory, and engineering requirements into a coherent platform strategy and sequence investments for long-term impact. - Declarative enforcement primitives: Build platform services, libraries, and reference patterns that make contracts, quality rules, privacy policies, and access requirements versioned, testable, observable, and automatically enforceable across the data lifecycle. - Semantic context for analytics and AI: Establish the technical foundations for a governed semantic context layer that connects business definitions, metadata, lineage, ownership, quality, freshness, and access policy. Enable trusted discovery, analytics, and AI-assisted or agentic experiences without turning this role into a model-development function. - Reliability across batch and streaming data: Lead the evolution of Data Trust capabilities across Snowflake, AWS data services, Kafka-based ingestion, and other batch or low-latency environments. Establish explicit SLOs, failure modes, correction paths, and operational ownership, supported by automated detection, containment, remediation, and recovery. - Mission-critical operational rigor: Raise the standard for production data systems through observability, integrity checks, audit evidence, incident learning, and safe automation. Help move the organization from reactive troubleshooting and manual compliance activity toward proactive, measurable control. - Cross-organizational technical leadership: Drive multi-quarter initiatives across teams and functions, earning alignment on difficult architectural tradeoffs and investment decisions. Serve as a trusted technical authority for Data Trust while mentoring senior engineers, strengthening design and implementation practices, and raising the broader engineering bar. What success looks like in the first 12–18 months: - A clear enterprise architecture and delivery path exists for Data Trust primitives spanning contracts, metadata, lineage, quality, privacy, and reliability. - Priority data domains have materially improved coverage, observability, SLOs, and automated enforcement. - The platform provides production-ready patterns for governing data in both batch and low-latency environments. - Initial semantic context capabilities are operating in production and provide more reliable, traceable context for analytics and AI use cases. - Manual investigation, recurring data failures, and compliance evidence-gathering are measurably reduced. - Engineering and partner teams have adopted reusable standards and capabilities rather than creating isolated point solutions. What you’ll need: - Experience & Education: 15+ years of software or data engineering experience (or 13+ years with a Master’s degree) with a proven track record of designing, building, and operating distributed data platforms at enterprise scale. - Platform Architecture Expertise: Deep experience designing horizontal, multi-tenant platform services that other engineering teams depend on. You understand the failure modes of distributed systems, eventual consistency, and how to balance latency, availability, and cost. - Data Trust & Governance Depth: Practical, battle-tested experience building or managing components of the modern data trust stack, such as data contracts, metadata catalogs, data quality frameworks, end-to-end lineage, and fine-grained access control (RBAC/ABAC). - Batch & Streaming Mastery: Advanced knowledge of modern data ecosystems, specifically Snowflake, Kafka (or similar streaming platforms), and AWS data services. You know how to govern data in motion just as effectively as data at rest. - Hands-On Engineering: Mastery of one or more core programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Go) and advanced SQL. You are comfortable writing production-grade code, conducting rigorous code reviews, and building declarative infrastructure (Terraform, CI/CD). - Cross-Organizational Leadership: A history of successfully driving multi-team, cross-functional technical initiatives. You know how to build consensus across Engineering, Security, Privacy, and Product teams, translating compliance and risk requirements into frictionless engineering primitives. - Operational Rigor: Experience managing Tier-0/mission-critical infrastructure. You build systems with a "trust but verify" mindset—relying on automated testing, drift detection, and circuit breakers rather than manual processes. Nice to have: - FinTech / Regulated Industry Experience: Prior experience operating in a highly regulated environment where auditability, data privacy (CCPA/GDPR), and data integrity are architectural requirements, not afterthoughts. - AI Infrastructure Exposure: Experience building semantic layers, knowledge graphs, or context engines that ground LLMs and autonomous agents in governed enterprise data. - Open Source Contributions: Contributions to relevant open-source data or metadata projects (e.g., Apache Iceberg, OpenMetadata, DataHub, Amundsen). ## Compensation and Benefits The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location. To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our [Benefits at SoFi](https://sofietyinfo.sofi.com/sofi-benefits) page! SoFi provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law. The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. [New York applicants: Notice of Employee Rights](https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2022/02/ls740_1.pdf) SoFi is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, SoFi offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email accommodations@sofi.com. We are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico at this time. Internal Employees If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open roles. ## About SoFi ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: SoFi is a next-generation fintech company using innovative, mobile-first technology to help 14.7 million members reach financial independence and “get their money right.” - **Entity Type**: Public (Ticker: SOFI on Nasdaq) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with offices in Seattle, New York, Frisco, Cottonwood Heights, Helena, Murray, Greenville, Claymont, and more) - **Founded**: 2011 - **Founders**: Founded by Stanford business school students (originally as Social Finance, Inc.) — specific names not listed in the provided sources. ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Personal finance / financial services (banking, lending, investment, credit, insurance) - **Target customers**: B2C (individual members seeking loans, banking, investing, credit cards, mortgages, travel rewards) and B2B (employer‑facing “SoFi at Work” benefits and financial wellness programs) - **Mission**: “To help people reach financial independence to realize their ambitions.” ## Products & Services - **[SoFi Checking & Savings](https://www.sofi.com/)**: FDIC‑insured checking and savings accounts with no fees, competitive APY, and early direct deposit. - **[SoFi Invest](https://www.sofi.com/invest/)**: Commission‑free stock trading, crypto trading, automated investing, and IPO access. - **[SoFi Personal Loans](https://www.sofi.com/personal-loans/)**: Unsecured personal loans for debt consolidation, home improvement, etc. (up to $100K). - **[SoFi Student Loan Refinancing](https://www.sofi.com/student-loans/)**: Refinancing for federal and private student loans (the first company to offer this). - **[SoFi Mortgages](https://www.sofi.com/mortgage/)**: Home purchase and refinance loans. - **[SoFi Credit Card](https://www.sofi.com/credit-card/)**: 2% unlimited cash back rewards on all eligible purchases. - **[SoFi Travel](https://www.sofi.com/travel/)**: Booking portal powered by Expedia, allowing members to save and earn rewards. - **[SoFi Insurance](https://www.sofi.com/insurance/)**: Comparison and access to auto, home, renters, pet, and life insurance. - **[SoFi at Work](https://www.sofi.com/at-work/)**: Employer‑sponsored financial wellness benefits, including student loan contributions and refinancing. - **[Galileo](https://www.sofi.com/our-story/)**: Financial technology platform (API‑based) for card issuing and digital banking, operated as a subsidiary. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Publicly traded on Nasdaq (SOFI). Current market cap is not directly provided in the sources; refer to SoFi’s latest SEC filings or financial data platforms. - **Key Metrics**: - **14.7 million members** (as of 2025‑2026) — [sofi.com](https://www.sofi.com/) - **$117 billion+ in funded loans** — [sofi.com](https://www.sofi.com/) - **$34 billion+ in debt paid off by members** — [sofi.com/our-story](https://www.sofi.com/our-story/) - **$12.5 billion+ in rewards earned** — [sofi.com](https://www.sofi.com/) - **Annual Revenue**: See SoFi Technologies 2025 Annual Report (SEC filing) for latest financial results — [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1818874/000181887426000034/sofitech2025ars.pdf) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not detailed in provided sources; historically received a $1 billion funding round in 2016 (the first U.S. fintech to do so) — [sofi.com/our-story](https://www.sofi.com/our-story/) - **Growth Signals**: - Received federal approval to become a national bank (2023) — [sofi.com/our-story](https://www.sofi.com/our-story/) - Reached 10 million members in 2022 and 14.7 million by early 2026 — [sofi.com](https://www.sofi.com/) - 121 open roles listed across 16 locations as of mid‑2026 — [sofi.com/careers](https://www.sofi.com/careers/) - Continuous product expansion (travel, credit card, bank, etc.) ## Competitive Advantages - **All‑in‑one fintech ecosystem**: Banking, lending, investing, insurance, and travel in a single mobile‑first app — hard for single‑product fintechs to replicate. - **SoFi National Bank**: FDIC‑insured checking and savings, giving SoFi a direct banking charter that reduces reliance on third‑party partners. - **Galileo Platform**: Powers card issuing and digital banking for many fintechs, creating a network effect and deeper technology moat. - **Member‑centric rewards**: SoFi Plus membership program bundles benefits (higher APY, bonus rewards, career coaching). - **Student loan repayment as employee benefit**: Unique perk for attracting talent (as well as offering SoFi at Work to other employers). ## Strategic Focus - **Deepen member engagement**: Cross‑sell more products within the single app to increase lifetime value. - **Grow the bank**: Expand deposits, lending, and banking services under the national bank charter. - **SoFi at Work**: Scale B2B benefits offering to acquire members through employers. - **International/vertical expansion**: Potential for new product lines (e.g., SoFi Travel, insurance marketplace). - **Maintain cost discipline**: Leverage technology to keep customer acquisition costs low while improving unit economics. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Defined by “The SoFi Way” — act as a founder, relentless problem solver, and partner to members and colleagues. Emphasis on transparency, trust, and cross‑collaboration. - **Flexible Work**: Some teams offer remote, hybrid, or full‑time in‑office based on role; managers help decide the best setting. SoFridays (no meetings after 2 p.m. local time) protect focus time. - **Benefits**: - **$200/month student loan contribution** to help employees pay down debt — [sofi.com/careers](https://www.sofi.com/careers/) - Comprehensive health, vision, dental, life, disability; fertility & family planning options; flexible time off - Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year + regular training and leadership programs - **SoFi Gives**: 16 hours of paid volunteer time off per year - **SoFi Circles**: 8 Employee Resource Groups fostering inclusion and belonging — [sofietyinfo.sofi.com/why-sofi](https://sofietyinfo.sofi.com/why-sofi) - **Learning & Development**: Career pathways, manager excellence framework, and mentorship programs. - **Monthly All‑Hands with CEO** for direct transparency. - **Locations**: Major hubs include San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Frisco (Texas); remote work is not available from Hawaii or Alaska due to insurance coverage — [sofi.com/careers](https://www.sofi.com/careers/) ## Sources 1. [SoFi Careers Page](https://www.sofi.com/careers/) — benefits, culture, job openings, locations 2. [SoFi Homepage](https://www.sofi.com/) — member count, funded loans, key metrics 3. [SoFi Our Story / About](https://www.sofi.com/our-story/) — founding history, milestones, mission 4. [SoFi 2025 Annual Report (SEC)](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1818874/000181887426000034/sofitech2025ars.pdf) — financials 5. [SoFi Candidate Resource Website (Why SoFi)](https://sofietyinfo.sofi.com/why-sofi) — flexible work, culture, SoFi Gives, learning programs, SoFridays ## Other roles at SoFi - [Investment Specialist II](https://feeny.ai/job/investment-specialist-ii-sofi-cottonwoods-heights-e2862sa4qfb7) — Cottonwoods Heights, UT - [Manager, Invest Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-invest-operations-sofi-cottonwood-heights-fw0s76fe8gyn) — Cottonwood Heights, UT - [Insurance Agent, Protect](https://feeny.ai/job/insurance-agent-protect-sofi-united-states-d5t5n3t4m1s7) — United States - [Staff Data Analyst (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-data-analyst-contract-sofi-san-francisco-6gs4jb7e3b0b) — San Francisco, CA / New York City, NY - [Executive Assistant, Office of the CTO](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-office-of-the-cto-sofi-san-francisco-yjetvc17dd1f) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Data Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-engineer-sofi-cottonwood-heights-5mba76v9twk8) — Cottonwood Heights, UT - [Senior Art Director (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-art-director-contract-sofi-san-francisco-wh57wk9hw7yp) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Production Designer (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-production-designer-contract-sofi-san-francisco-0zxvsysyatqp) — San Francisco, CA - [Interactive Designer (Contract)](https://feeny.ai/job/interactive-designer-contract-sofi-san-francisco-4a9tpjvt5g39) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer, AML](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-aml-sofi-seattle-cpjbp35tjvmt) — Seattle, WA