The role:

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager on the Protect team, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for building SoFi's next-generation Insurance platform. In this role, you will set the technical vision and execution strategy for a critical, high-growth business function where the architecture is relatively greenfield and the business impact is high.

You will guide teams that value diverse perspectives and foster environments where everyone can contribute and develop. You will champion a culture of continuous learning, responsible experimentation, accountability, and curiosity. Partnering closely with Product, Design, Compliance, and Operations, you will lead the complete product development lifecycle—from conceptualization through deployment, scaling, and ongoing enhancement.

What you’ll do:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering group, managing hiring, team structure, performance coaching, and career development for mid-to-senior engineers.

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and resilient delivery of highly scalable, distributed insurance platform services and API contracts.

• Partner cross-functionally with Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, and Risk to translate product roadmaps into dependable technical roadmaps and business outcomes.

• Drive operational excellence across your squads by establishing modern testing methodologies, CI/CD pipelines, observability dashboards, and clear incident response runbooks.

• Evaluate emerging architectural patterns and technologies to enhance system maintainability, latency, fault tolerance, and security.

• Champion responsible AI-assisted engineering practices, helping the team leverage modern tools to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and reduce administrative toil while safeguarding sensitive data.

• Communicate technical roadmaps, architectural trade-offs, and project status to senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders with clarity and transparency.

What you’ll need:

• Education & Minimum Experience Requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline + 8 years of professional software engineering experience (or Master’s degree + 6 years), with at least 4 years formally leading and managing software engineering teams.

• Proven distributed systems expertise, including designing scalable microservices, defining resilient API contracts, and addressing data consistency, idempotency, and failure modes in high-volume environments.

• Deep technical acumen to lead architecture design reviews, evaluate technical proposals, and maintain a high engineering quality standard across modern cloud systems.

• Demonstrated record of taking products from concept to production (zero-to-one delivery) serving real-world users.

• Track record of building inclusive, high-trust engineering teams, developing talent, and managing performance effectively.

• Collaborative leadership capabilities with the ability to build consensus and drive alignment across Product, Operations, Risk, and Compliance.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to articulate complex system trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and executive leaders.

Nice to have:

• 10+ years of overall software engineering experience.

• Hands-on experience with JVM-based stacks (Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot) and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform).

• Domain expertise in FinTech, InsurTech, consumer payments, policy administration systems, or regulated financial services.

• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka).