Senior Staff AI Engineer

The role:

SoFi’s Staff AI Engineer is a hands-on AI engineering role in SoFi’s growing independent risk organization. This is a critical senior role responsible for setting the technical direction driving execution and ensuring the successful delivery of our most complex production-level AI initiatives. This role will be instrumental in conceptualizing prototyping and implementing best-in-class AI-based solutions to meet risk management and compliance requirements.

This hands-on role will work closely with the Director of Risk Analytics and will leverage your deep expertise to solve our hardest problems mentor the next generation of engineers and directly connect technical innovation to major business success. This is a crucial role for the independent risk function as we execute our mission to help more members get their money right.

What you’ll do: 

• Architecture and Strategy: Define the long-term technical architecture and strategy for our next-generation AI platform particularly focusing on robust scalable agentic frameworks and LLM deployment patterns.
• Advanced LLM Orchestration: Architect and standardize the use of graph-based LLM orchestration leveraging expert-level mastery of LangGraph to solve highly complex multi-stage reasoning problems at scale.
• Distributed Agent Memory & State: Develop robust persistent infrastructure for agentic state management ensuring that long-running agent workflows maintain context and reliability across distributed nodes and regional failovers
• Deep Model Optimization: Pioneer and institutionalize advanced parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and compression techniques to maximize model performance and minimize operational costs across the organization.
• Model Serving Infrastructure: Support the development of a unified model serving platform designed to host internally fine-tuned and custom-trained models to ensure high-throughput low-latency inference across diverse hardware footprints.
• Operational Excellence: Define and enforce high standards for AI operationalization requiring mastery in designing and deploying comprehensive AI observability solutions and advanced tracing/testing frameworks that guarantee production quality compliance and reliability.
• Mentorship: Mentor senior and junior AI Engineers elevating the overall engineering quality
• Cross Functional Collaboration: Coordinate with cross-functional teams to distill specific requirements project roadmaps and ensure accurate and on-time project deliveries
• AI Innovation: Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in GenAI LLMs and NLP evaluating and experimenting with new techniques and tools to push the boundaries of AI innovation in the banking sector.

What you’ll need:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science Data Science AI Machine Learning or a related field. PhD is a plus.
• 8+ years software development experience with 3+ years of hands-on experience in developing and successfully deploying production-level AI applications that have been used by real customers or internal stakeholders.
• Expert-level experience with LangGraph to model and orchestrate complex stateful multi-step reasoning and control flow in LLM applications.
• Expert-level proficiency in developing sophisticated agentic solutions with a portfolio demonstrating advanced use of planning memory management tool integration and control flow.
• Deep understanding of Large Language Model (LLM) architectures prompt engineering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and advanced text generation techniques.
• Proven experience implementing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques (e.g. LoRA) to customize and optimize pre-trained models for specific tasks with minimal computational overhead.
• Deep expertise in building or extending inference engines (e.g. vLLM NVIDIA Triton or TGI) and managing the underlying Kubernetes/GPU orchestration for custom model deployments.
• Deep experience designing and institutionalizing AI observability solutions (e.g. LangSmith Arize Deepchecks) and advanced tracing and testing methodologies for LLM and agentic systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS Azure or GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker Kubernetes).
• Expert level Python is required.
• React is strongly preferred.
• Experience with large-scale data handling including unstructured and structured data pipelines with a strong preference for Snowflake and DynamoDB.
• Experience developing and integrating AI-powered APIs and microservices architecture into banking applications.
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques using systems like Elasticsearch Pinecone or FAISS for enhancing LLM performance.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts drive consensus among senior technical leaders and influence organizational AI strategy.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail and an ability to work with complex large-scale systems.
• Strong collaboration skills with experience working in agile cross-functional teams.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and ethical considerations in AI within the banking industry (e.g. GDPR data privacy model explainability).
• Experience in banking or financial services use cases such as conversational AI for customer service intelligent document processing for loan applications fraud detection or risk analysis.

What We Do

SoFi wasn’t built to be a bank. Or a technology company. We were built for one mission: help people achieve financial independence so they can realize their ambitions. Redefining an entire industry isn’t easy work—and it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes a certain kind of team. People with diverse perspectives and expertise united by a common sense of purpose. People willing to challenge assumptions but always do the right thing. People proving that innovation and responsibility don’t have to compete but can come together to create something truly unconventional in the world. For the last eight years we’ve been charting this new path forward. We call it The SoFi Way. At SoFi we don’t just talk about culture: we live it. The SoFi Way is how we show up every day how we make decisions and how we build for our members clients and each other.

Why Work With Us

Together with our members we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation Fintech company using innovative mobile-first technology to help our members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation and we’re at the forefront.

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