Staff Software Engineer, Builder Tools

The Role

We are looking for a seasoned Staff Software Engineer to join our Builder Tools engineering organization with a mission to enable SoFi engineers to elegantly solve problems. In this role, you will have the opportunity to directly impact, influence and lead the direction and architecture of our developer tooling, and elevate developer experience by enabling engineers through foundational systems. You will get the chance to define, 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 - Provide leadership for the technical architecture and design, implementation, delivery and operational excellence of code, build, CI/CD platforms, backend language frameworks, libraries (Java, Kotlin) and related developer tooling.
• Innovate - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive innovation in developer tooling, and advancements including AI assisted developer productivity flows.
• Exemplary Practitioner  - Be a subject matter expert for one more developer tooling domains,  including operational excellence aspects. 
• Mentor - Collaborate with engineers in the team, provide mentorship, and domain expertise to enhance the overall technical capabilities of the team..
• 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 and cross-organizational teams.
• Influence - Implement and influence the adoption of developer tooling and best practices.

What You’ll Need:

• Experience - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years software development experience.
• Experience developing in a cloud environment (AWS), using containers (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), cloud-native technologies and service meshes (e.g., Istio, Envoy). 
• Expertise -  Expertise in build systems for JVM ecosystem (e.g., Gradle, Bazel), AI assisted developer tools (e.g., CoPilot, Amazon Q),  and CI/CD systems (e.g., ArgoCD, Gitlab, BuildKite).
• Design - Strong understanding of software design principles, and distributed systems architecture.
• Problem solving -  Strong problem solving and programming fundamentals (algorithms, data structures).
• Coding Skills - Proven coding skills (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Python) delivering large scale systems with infrastructure automation (e.g., Terraform).
• Project Ownership - Ability to own, manage and deliver projects from scoping through launch. Experience working with Agile development processes.
• Strong Interpersonal  skills - Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate well with technical and non-technical members, and proven skills to operate effectively in a cross-functional team. 

Nice to have:

• Experience with security, compliance, and risk management in cloud environments.
• Experience with monitoring and logging (e.g. Datadog, Elastic, Splunk).
• Experience with container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) and networking