Senior Engineering Manager, Protect

The role:

As the Senior Software Engineering Manager for the Protect team, you will lead the engineering organization building our next-generation Insurance platform. You will establish technical and operational direction for a rapidly expanding, mission-critical business line at SoFi where core platform architecture is greenfield and business impact is direct and tangible. This is an opportunity to shape long-term platform capabilities, architecture, and engineering culture across the organization.

You thrive on cultivating engineering teams that value diverse perspectives and foster environments where every team member can contribute and grow. You champion continuous learning, lead iterative experimentation, take end-to-end ownership, and inspire ongoing technical curiosity. At SoFi, we hold deep conviction in tight partnership across Product, Design, Risk, and Engineering; you will engage across the entire lifecycle—from product ideation and distributed systems design to high-availability deployment and continuous system evolution.

What you’ll do:

• Lead team building, organizational design, talent acquisition, performance management, and career development across multiple engineering squads.

• Guide architectural strategy and lead the delivery of highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform services in a cloud-native production environment.

• Partner with Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, and Operations to translate member needs and strategic business goals into resilient technical solutions.

• Identify, evaluate, and implement modern architectural patterns and frameworks to enhance system reliability, maintainability, and operational elegance.

• Champion operational excellence, establishing robust automated testing, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), and incident mitigation practices across all team services.

• Coach and mentor mid-level to senior software engineers and engineering leads, fostering a culture of technical excellence and clear career progression.

• Facilitate constructive technical design reviews, navigate architectural trade-offs, and establish shared engineering standards across partner domains.

• Communicate roadmaps, architectural trade-offs, and system health effectively with cross-functional partners and senior leadership.

What you’ll need:

• Education & Minimum Experience Requirements: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field + 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 4 years in engineering management leading teams of software engineers (OR Master’s Degree in a related technical field + 8+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 4 years in engineering management).

• Proven track record of zero-to-one product delivery, taking new platform capabilities from concept through production rollout with active users.

• Exceptional distributed systems design expertise—able to design resilient microservices, define API contracts, and navigate consistency, idempotency, and failure modes in high-volume workflows.

• Demonstrated technical depth—capable of evaluating architecture proposals, leading rigorous design reviews, and maintaining a high standard for software maintainability and system health.

• Proven cross-functional leadership—demonstrated ability to align Product, Design, Compliance, Risk, and Operations partners autonomously to deliver business outcomes.

• Familiarity with JVM-based stacks (Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot) and modern cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines).

• Excellent communication and presentation skills—able to articulate complex system trade-offs clearly to executive stakeholders and partner teams.

• Experience cultivating psychological safety, mentorship, and high-performance standards within engineering teams.

Nice to have:

• Direct domain experience in FinTech, InsurTech, consumer insurance workflows, or highly regulated financial ecosystems.

• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka, Temporal.io, AWS Step Functions).