Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Networking Platform

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice Who we are: Shape a brighter financial future with us. Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world. The role: We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to own the long-term networking vision for all of SoFi. SoFi runs almost entirely in AWS, and every member interaction, from opening the app to moving money, travels over the cloud networks this role will shape: the internet edge, DNS, CDN and WAF, load balancing and ingress, VPC and multi-account connectivity, service-to-service traffic, and connectivity to our partners. You will sit on the Cloud Platform team, but your scope and impact are company-wide. You will define the north-star cloud network architecture and the multi-year path to get there. That includes multi-region and multi-cluster traffic management, incremental rollout and progressive delivery at the network layer, and a network that is resilient, secure, and fast for our members. You will also guide the strategy for our small on-premises colocation footprint, including how it connects to the cloud. You will identify the hard problems others miss, make the critical tradeoffs, and lead them from idea through execution. You will lead how we use AI to run networking and infrastructure. We are moving toward an AI-accelerated SDLC for infrastructure, and you will design and build the automation, agentic workflows, and guardrails that let us change the network faster and more safely, and help other infrastructure teams do the same. This is a hands-on, high-influence role. You will partner with engineering, security, risk and compliance, SRE, architecture, and business leaders across SoFi and its technology platform businesses. Your partnership with Security and Compliance is especially important: you will help shape the network policies and standards that govern how SoFi's network is built and changed, and make sure they are practical to implement and automate. Beyond networking, you will bring enough depth in compute, Kubernetes, identity, and infrastructure as code to give strategic guidance and feedback across the broader Cloud Platform. The ideal candidate is a recognized networking expert and a mentor who is equally comfortable writing the design doc, reviewing the code, and leading the incident bridge. They have a solid sense of ownership and can explain a hard tradeoff to engineers and executives alike. What you’ll do: • Network strategy and architecture: Own the long-term technical vision for networking across SoFi, defining a north-star architecture and an incremental, multi-year roadmap. Lead the architecture of member-facing networking. Design multi-region and multi-cluster networking. Enable incremental rollout and progressive delivery. Set direction for service-to-service and multi-account connectivity. Drive network automation end to end. • AI and automation: Lead the use of AI to design, operate, and change networks and infrastructure. Define the guardrails, policy checks, and success criteria that make AI-guided infrastructure changes safe in a regulated environment. Build reusable AI tooling and patterns that other infrastructure teams can adopt. • Leadership and influence: Serve as a strategic technical advisor to Infrastruc