Staff Software Engineer, Streaming and Workflows

The role:

As a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) on the Streaming & Workflows (SAW) team, you will serve as the dedicated company-wide technical owner and architect for SoFi’s distributed Workflow Orchestration Platform (Temporal Cloud). Temporal is one of the most widely adopted platform services across SoFi, executing mission-critical, stateful financial workflows including loan origination, user verification, ledger transactions, and automated money movement.

You will define and drive the 12-month platform vision and technical roadmap, overhaul how SoFi integrates with and manages Temporal, manage our technical partnership with Temporal Cloud, build core self-service platform features, and offer mentorship to other less experienced team members. You will lead by example through hands-on architecture and responsible daily AI-assisted engineering, setting the gold standard for platform reliability, developer experience, and cost management company-wide.

What you’ll do:

• Own the technical vision, architectural roadmap, and operational strategy for SoFi's enterprise Temporal workflow orchestration platform.
• Re-architect and modernize SoFi’s multi-region resiliency leveraging Temporal Cloud: design self-service namespace provisioning, access control automation, Codec Servers, and standardized client SDKs/libraries.
• Serve as the primary technical interface and owner for the external Temporal Cloud vendor relationship, optimizing cluster efficiency, feature adoption, and infrastructure costs.
• Author clear architectural blueprints, developer guides, and SDK standards, educating and upskilling engineering teams across all SoFi business units.
• Mentor and elevate engineers on the SAW team (IC1–IC3), fostering technical growth through pair programming, architectural reviews, and constructive feedback.
• Act as a lead operational resolver during high-severity platform incidents, diagnosing distributed failure states and driving post-incident remediation to prevent recurrence.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders across Lending, Banking, Invest, and Risk to unblock complex distributed workflow use cases.

What you’ll need:

• Education & Minimum Experience Requirements: Bachelor’s Degree with 8+ Years of Experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput distributed systems or platform services in production or Master’s Degree with 6+ Years of Experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field. 
• Deep proficiency in at least one modern language: Go, Java, Kotlin, or Python.
• Proven track record of owning distributed platform architecture, defining technical roadmaps, and driving technical consensus across multiple engineering squads.
• Practical experience with cloud architecture (AWS preferred, Azure or GCP acceptable), containers, and Kubernetes in large-scale production environments.
• Experience managing platform telemetry (metrics, distributed tracing, alerting) and driving operational excellence for high-availability systems.
• Superb written and verbal communication skills, with proven ability to educate, influence, and mentor engineering peers.

AI-Assisted Engineering Expectations:

• Model and champion the daily use of AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate architectural prototyping, generate resilient test suites, build client tooling, and automate developer documentation.
• Establish team standards for critically evaluating and validating AI-generated code to safeguard platform security, data integrity, and compliance.

Nice to have:

• Production experience with Temporal, Cadence, or similar stateful workflow orchestration systems.
• Prior experience on an internal developer platform (Platform-as-a-Product) or infrastructure team where internal developers were your direct customers.
• Familiarity with event streaming architectures (Apache Kafka, WarpStream, Kafka Connect) or distributed message queues (RabbitMQ).
• Experience managing SaaS/cloud vendor relationships and driving infrastructure cost-optimization initiatives.
• Background in financial services, banking platforms, or regulated environments.