Role Overview

ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer to join the Person Resource team and design and build the core services that define and manage a person's identity within our platform. This includes ownership of the data models, APIs, and systems responsible for person creation, attributes, and profiles.

As a Staff Engineer, you will play a key role in architecting and scaling the Person platform to ensure it is secure, consistent, and performant across ID.me's ecosystem. You'll design APIs and services that serve as the source of truth for personal data, working across identity, verification, and platform teams to deliver a scalable and high-performance API that enables the interoperability and integrity of digital credentials used by millions of users and trusted partners.

This position will be based full-time in either our McLean, VA or Mountain View, CA office.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement Person Services, managing attribute bundles and trust for the Person entity.
• Build RESTful and GraphQL endpoints that meet strict standards for reliability, latency, and security, and integrate seamlessly with both internal and external systems.
• Develop robust data models and storage patterns to represent provenance and relationships across relational and graph databases.
• Implement credential lifecycle flows — including creation, validation, renewal, and revocation — integrated with ID.me's identity verification and attribute validation systems.
• Ensure the security and privacy of Person data through strong authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit practices.
• Collaborate closely with Platform, Identity, Security, and Partner Engineering teams to deliver end-to-end features and integrations.
• Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code, including automated tests and observability instrumentation.
• Contribute to system design discussions, code reviews, and technical documentation to drive clarity and alignment across teams.
• Continuously optimize performance, scalability, and reliability for Person services in production environments.
• Mentor and support senior and mid-level engineers, helping grow technical depth and team capability.
• Stay current on emerging identity and credentialing standards (e.g., Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, OIDC extensions) and bring new ideas into the product.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• 8+ years of professional experience developing backend services and APIs in production environments.
• 8+ years of experience in at least one backend language (Python, Go, or Java) and with modern frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated expertise in building and operating public-facing REST or GraphQL APIs at scale.
• Deep experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL or graph data stores.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts, caching, asynchronous processing, and cloud-native patterns.
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, or custom schemes).
• Proven ability to design, document, and evolve APIs used by multiple internal and external consumers.
• Familiarity with identity and credential verification systems, including data validation, proofing, or trust scoring.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containerization and deployment pipelines.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures (Kafka, SNS/SQS) and patterns for decoupled service communication.
• Exposure to digital credential and identity standards (e.g., Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, W3C DID specs).
• Experience with API gateway technologies (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway).
• Strong debugging and performance optimization skills in complex production systems.
• Contributions to open-source backend or identity-related projects are a plus.
• Experience in regulated or high-assurance domains (government, financial, or healthcare systems) is advantageous.