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Practising for the listing Staff Software Engineer, Streaming and Workflows. Its requirements are filled in below. When you have an answer you like, paste it with your CV in Career Mirror to see which of the job's skills it shows.

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Staff Software Engineer, Streaming and Workflows
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:

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.

Compensation and Benefits

The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.

To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page!

SoFi provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law.

The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

New York applicants: Notice of Employee Rights

SoFi is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, SoFi offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email accommodations@sofi.com.

We are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico at this time.

Internal Employees

If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open roles.

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Requirements found

Python Compliance

What this posting asks for

Level: Lead / staff — The title says "Staff".

Main responsibilities

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 So…
You will define and drive the 12-month platform vision and technical roadmap, overhaul how SoFi integrates with and manages Temporal, manage our technical pa…
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, C…
Serve as the primary technical interface and owner for the external Temporal Cloud vendor relationship, optimizing cluster efficiency, feature adoption, and …
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 pr…
Partner with product and engineering leaders across Lending, Banking, Invest, and Risk to unblock complex distributed workflow use cases.

Competencies an interviewer will look for

Technical skill Core
In the posting: “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 So…” · “You will lead by example through hands-on architecture and responsible daily AI-assisted engineering, setting the gold standard for platform reliability, dev…” · “Author clear architectural blueprints, developer guides, and SDK standards, educating and upskilling engineering teams across all SoFi business units.”
Show it by: Names the tools, languages or systems used and how; Explains a technical choice and its trade-off.
Leadership and mentoring Core
In the posting: “You will define and drive the 12-month platform vision and technical roadmap, overhaul how SoFi integrates with and manages Temporal, manage our technical pa…” · “Mentor and elevate engineers on the SAW team (IC1–IC3), fostering technical growth through pair programming, architectural reviews, and constructive feedback.” · “Superb written and verbal communication skills, with proven ability to educate, influence, and mentor engineering peers.”
Show it by: Describes setting direction or a standard others followed; Names someone they coached and what changed for them.
Customer focus Core
In the posting: “Re-architect and modernize SoFi’s multi-region resiliency leveraging Temporal Cloud: design self-service namespace provisioning, access control automation, C…” · “Model and champion the daily use of AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate architectural prototyping, generate resilient test suites, build client tooli…” · “Prior experience on an internal developer platform (Platform-as-a-Product) or infrastructure team where internal developers were your direct customers.”
Show it by: Puts the customer's need in their own words; Shows a result for the customer, not only for the company.
Attention to detail and quality Core
In the posting: “You will lead by example through hands-on architecture and responsible daily AI-assisted engineering, setting the gold standard for platform reliability, dev…” · “Author clear architectural blueprints, developer guides, and SDK standards, educating and upskilling engineering teams across all SoFi business units.” · “Establish team standards for critically evaluating and validating AI-generated code to safeguard platform security, data integrity, and compliance.”
Show it by: Gives an example of an error caught before it caused harm; Names the check or standard they used.
Stakeholder management Core
In the posting: “Serve as the primary technical interface and owner for the external Temporal Cloud vendor relationship, optimizing cluster efficiency, feature adoption, and …” · “Superb written and verbal communication skills, with proven ability to educate, influence, and mentor engineering peers.” · “Experience managing SaaS/cloud vendor relationships and driving infrastructure cost-optimization initiatives.”
Show it by: Shows how they aligned people with different goals; Explains how they handled a 'no' from someone senior.
Communication Core
In the posting: “Superb written and verbal communication skills, with proven ability to educate, influence, and mentor engineering peers.” · “Model and champion the daily use of AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate architectural prototyping, generate resilient test suites, build client tooli…”
Show it by: Adapts the message to the listener; Gives an example of explaining something clearly in writing or speech.
Data and analysis Core
In the posting: “Experience managing platform telemetry (metrics, distributed tracing, alerting) and driving operational excellence for high-availability systems.” · “Establish team standards for critically evaluating and validating AI-generated code to safeguard platform security, data integrity, and compliance.”
Show it by: Uses a number to describe the situation or the result; Explains what the data showed and what was done with it.
Problem solving Supporting
In the posting: “Act as a lead operational resolver during high-severity platform incidents, diagnosing distributed failure states and driving post-incident remediation to pr…”
Show it by: Describes a real problem, the options considered and the one chosen; Shows how the cause was found, not just the fix.
Teamwork and collaboration Supporting
In the posting: “Partner with product and engineering leaders across Lending, Banking, Invest, and Risk to unblock complex distributed workflow use cases.”
Show it by: Says what they did inside a team, not only what 'we' did; Shows how a disagreement was handled.
Ownership and accountability Supporting
In the posting: “Own the technical vision, architectural roadmap, and operational strategy for SoFi's enterprise Temporal workflow orchestration platform.”
Show it by: Takes a task from start to finish without being chased; Owns a mistake and what was changed after it.

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Practice questions

Tell me about yourself. Dedicated step-by-step practice.
If an interviewer asks something improper How to respond to questions about age, family, origin or health.
Built from this posting (8):
Walk me through a piece of work where you used your strongest technical skill. What exactly did you do? From this posting
Tell me about a time you helped someone on your team get better at their work. From this posting
Describe a time you went out of your way to solve a customer's problem. From this posting
Tell me about a time you caught an error before it reached a customer or a report. From this posting
How have you used python in your work? Walk me through one real example. From this posting
Tell me about a problem you solved using compliance. From this posting
Tell me about a difficult problem you solved at work. How did you find the cause? From this posting
Describe a time you worked with another team to deliver something. What was your part? From this posting
This posting reads as Software engineering: its questions come first.
Walk me through a feature you built from start to finish. What tools and languages did you use? Software engineering
Tell me about the hardest bug you have tracked down. How did you find the cause? Software engineering
Describe a technical design decision you made and the trade-off behind it. Software engineering
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate in a code review. Software engineering
Production is down and you are the first engineer to notice. What do you do in the first 30 minutes? Software engineering
How do you decide what to test before you ship a change? Software engineering
Tell me about a time you helped a less experienced engineer get unstuck. Software engineering
Your estimate for a feature turns out to be badly wrong halfway through. What do you do? Software engineering
Describe a time you handled an upset customer or colleague.
Tell me about a time you had several deadlines at once. How did you decide what to do first?
Give an example of a mistake you caught before it caused a problem.
Tell me about a time you taught someone how to do something.
Describe a time you took the lead without being asked.
Tell me about a time you had to explain something complicated in simple terms.
Describe a process you improved.
Do you have any questions for us?
Why do you want to work here?
Why is there a gap in your employment? Difficult question
Why did you leave your last job? Difficult question
Why are you changing careers? Difficult question
What is your greatest weakness? Difficult question
What are your salary expectations? Difficult question
You seem overqualified for this role. Why do you want it? Difficult question
Improper-question practice: How old are you? / Do you have children? / Where are you from originally?
A customer is angry about a delay you did not cause. What do you do?
How do you keep track of many open customer requests?
Tell me about a time you could not give a customer what they wanted.
You find that the inventory count does not match the system. What do you do?
Tell me about a time a shipment or delivery went wrong.
How do you make sure safety rules are followed on a busy shift?
Two managers ask you to book the same room at the same time. What do you do?
How have you used spreadsheets in your work?
Tell me about a time you had to enter or check a lot of data accurately.
Tell me about a sale or agreement you are proud of.
A prospect says your price is too high. How do you respond?
How do you keep your pipeline organised?
Tell me about a technical problem you solved on your own.
You find a bug right before a release. What do you do?
Walk me through how you would check whether a report's numbers are right.