Staff Enterprise Architect

This role can be worked hybrid from these SoFi Offices and possibly 100% remote

San Francisco, CA

Salt Lake City, UT

Seattle, WA

Enterprise Architect (Enterprise Architecture Practice Lead) — SoFi

The Role:

SoFi is seeking an experienced Enterprise Architect to drive the expansion and enhancement of our Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice. While the foundation of our EA function exists, we are looking for a visionary leader to help take the practice to the next level—maturing our methodologies, scaling our standards, and deepening the alignment between our technology investments and SoFi’s rapid growth.

The ideal candidate is business-savvy and technically proficient: a generalist across business, application, data, and technology architecture domains who applies holistic thinking to align technology, business process, risk, and financial outcomes to SoFi’s strategy. Reporting into the Technology organization, you will be a hands-on leader who instantiates the enterprise continuum, establishes rigorous standards, and coaches others in areas such as governance and roadmap development.

What You’ll Do:

1) Strategic Planning & Enterprise Vision

• Enhance and scale the long-term enterprise technology roadmap and vision, ensuring it evolves alongside SoFi’s corporate strategy and operating model.
• Evaluate existing systems and identify modernization opportunities across platforms and shared services to support future business needs.
• Assess emerging technologies—including AI-enabled productivity and automation—to enhance innovation while maintaining architectural integrity.
• Drive financial rigor in technology decisioning, leveraging metrics such as ROI, EVA, and NPV to justify architectural shifts.

2) Architecture Design, Standards & Governance

• Mature the EA practice by curating the enterprise continuum, defining reference architectures, and establishing "gold standards" for the organization.
• Own and enforce architecture governance policies and change advisory processes that ensure systems are scalable, secure, resilient, and interoperable.
• Mature the governance and lifecycle management of our SaaS application portfolio, ensuring consistency, security, and cost-efficiency across the organization.
• Architect the infrastructure and integration patterns required to support our enterprise AI strategy and other high-scale initiatives.

3) Architecture Across Domains

• Business & Security Architecture
• Examine all business processes and technology in a holistic manner, ensuring alignment via methodologies like cascading goals or OKRs.
• Deepen the architectural integration of core corporate processes, including Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Hire to Retire, Security, and GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance).
• Ensure that security and risk management are "baked into" the business architecture rather than treated as an afterthought.
• Applications & Data Architecture
• Lead the design of large-scale, complex enterprise systems using loosely-coupled, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices patterns.
• Oversee enterprise-level application portfolio management, roadmapping, and the maturation of master data management solutions.
• Guide the evolution of data platforms, including EDW/data lakes, ETL/ELT, and real-time streaming data(e.g., Kafka).
• Technology Architecture
• Provide architectural oversight for data center building blocks and cloud capabilities (ideally AWS).
• Proven experience implementing Architecture-as-Code and 'Shift-Left' principles to automate architectural compliance within CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven experience transitioning from manual architectural reviews to a Guardrails-based Governance model that integrates compliance checks directly into the SDLC.

4) Stakeholder Collaboration & Leadership

• Act as the primary bridge between high-level business strategy and technical implementation, translating complex technical trade-offs into business terms for executive leadership.
• Demonstrate diplomacy and persuasion when orchestrating enterprise-wide changes, collaborating effectively across all levels of the organization.
• Passionately elevate the technical talent around you through mentoring, coaching, and establishing best practices that improve productivity and quality across multiple engineering teams.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of broad experience across the architecture domains of: business, applications, data, and technology.
• Proven track record in a similarly scoped role, having owned or significantly enhanced the design and strategy for an organization’s enterprise technology.
• Business Architecture Expertise: Working knowledge of common corporate processes (Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Hire to Retire, Security and GRC) domains.
• Technical Leadership: Deep understanding of SOA, microservices, and REST APIs (XML/JSON), with real-world experience building scalable, globally-shared solutions.
• Data Proficiency: Experience with master data management, data warehousing, and big data streaming/ETL patterns.
• Infrastructure Awareness: Exposure to IaaS (AWS), IaC, and CI/CD-driven automation.
• Framework Knowledge: Demonstrable knowledge of common frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman, ISO, ITIL, or Agile/SaFE.
• Communication: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to syndicate roadmaps and influence executive-level stakeholders.
• Tooling: Familiarity with productivity platforms (Google Workspace, Slack, Jira) and emerging AI tools (Copilot, Gemini, Glean) is appreciated.

Education:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in information systems, computer science, or a combination of degrees spanning technical and business disciplines.
• Current TOGAF certification is a plus.

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