Staff Software Development Engineer - Person API

About the role

ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer to join the Person Resource team. This role involves designing and building core services that define and manage a person's identity within the ID.me platform. Responsibilities include managing attribute bundles and trust for the Person entity, developing robust data models and storage patterns, implementing credential lifecycle flows, ensuring data security and privacy, collaborating with various engineering teams, and continuously optimizing services.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Person Services, managing attribute bundles and trust for the Person entity.
• Build RESTful and GraphQL endpoints meeting strict standards for reliability, latency, and security, integrating seamlessly with internal and external systems.
• Develop data models and storage patterns representing 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 security and privacy of Person data through strong authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit practices.
• Collaborate 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.