Senior Principal Software Engineer, Applied Generative AI

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer to provide AI leadership to SoFi’s technology organization. In this role, you will directly influence, impact and lead the AI enablement strategy for SoFi in collaboration with key engineering and data science leaders. Your work will focus on championing best practices for applying AI to a wide variety of domains, particularly software development and our back-office, along with leading the vision for the infrastructure and approach required to support these use cases and ensuring we can rapidly adopt the latest foundation model capability and emerging best practices. To facilitate this, you will oversee a build over buy approach to make sure we avoid friction due to heavy dependency on third party vendors while ensuring we make judicious investments in vendors that are likely to accelerate our delivery and not inhibit future innovation.

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 applying AI in the software development domain with experience impacting business users and non-technical team members. You should have experience and a willingness to mentor and develop skills across our organization and evangelize the use of AI alongside traditional techniques to improve the velocity and quality of the company. You will be expected to dive in and lead prototyping and production solutions as needed to drive these broad-based organizational changes.

What You’ll Do:

• Technical leadership - Provide thought leadership around enabling and applying  AI across the company.
• Strategic Partnership  - Serve as a key strategic technical advisor to engineering and select business leadership, influencing roadmaps, 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:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field.
• 15+ years of software development experience
• Significant experience in the last several years applying Gener