Staff Software Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Architect & Lead Trust Graph Systems: Own the technical vision and architecture for the Trust Service — the data model, the API surface, the query and write patterns, and the operational characteristics of the service at scale. Drive architectural decisions with a long view: make the system more correct, more observable, and easier to evolve without breaking consumers.
• API Contract & Data Model Stewardship: Own the REST API contracts and inspection data model that downstream services, identity workflows, and product teams depend on. Lead decisions about versioning strategy, backwards compatibility, and the principles that govern how new inspection types and identity providers are introduced safely. Hold the line on contract integrity across teams.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as the technical anchor for the team. Setting the standard for code quality, system design, and engineering best practices. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance. Elevate how the team thinks about correctness, observability, and long-term maintainability.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with Identity, Authentication, Fraud, Workflow, Platform, and Compliance teams whose products are built on top of the trust chain. Drive alignment on shared data model decisions and multi-team API changes. Be the authoritative technical voice for what the Trust Service can and should do when adjacent teams bring new requirements.
• Reliability, Performance & Security: Own the availability and correctness of trust reads and writes at production scale. Lead initiatives around observability, alert hygiene, query performance, capacity planning, and incident response for a service that downstream teams depend on continuously. Ensure the service meets the security and compliance requirements of a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2/AAL2 credentialing system.
• Roadmap Influence: Provide technical input into team and platform roadmap planning. Identify and advocate for engineering investments in reliability, data model flexibility, API ergonomics, and developer experience that improve the Trust Service as a platform and raise engineering velocity across the teams that depend on it.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating high-availability, correctness-critical backend services
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from definition through delivery with minimal oversight
• Deep comfort with relational databases — designing schemas, writing complex queries, reasoning about query performance, and managing safe schema evolution in production
• Experience designing and versioning REST APIs and owning the contracts that downstream teams and SDKs depend on
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) with a commitment to an AI-first engineering culture that maximizes team quality and velocity
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience influencing technical direction across engineering, product, and security stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with Java or another JVM language, including modern language features applied to production systems
• Familiarity with graph or highly relational data models — entity relationships, traversal patterns, and the tradeoffs between different read/write shapes at scale
• Comfort reasoning about identity trust decisions: what it means for an identity claim to be verified, how different inspection methods vary in reliability, and how temporal decay or expiration affects downstream access
• Experience with identity standards such as NIST 800-63-3, OAuth2, or OpenID Connect, particularly in the context of federal or regulated-industry deployments
• Proven ability to own and evolve platform APIs consumed by multiple internal teams — understanding the full lifecycle of a contract from design through versioning and deprecation
• Track record of improving engineering culture through documentation, technical standards, architectural review, and developer experience improvements
• Experience working in regulated industries such as government, healthcare, or financial services