Principal Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Own the data model strategy and long-term architecture for Work Profiles and Communities, including how person-to-organization, person-to-credential, and domain-to-organization relationships are represented, validated, and queried.
• Own the API contracts across both platforms — including the Affiliation Profile API, Work Profile issuance and lifecycle APIs, and the OIDC extensions that surface organizational claims to downstream partners — covering versioning, compatibility, and governance.
• Set technical direction and design standards for the domain, establishing the patterns that allow ID.me to deliver new community profiles to customer specification at scale and speed.
• Define and evolve the profile configuration model — the eligibility rules, assurance tiers, validation mechanisms, and attribute mappings that power both self-service community creation and high-assurance enterprise use cases.
• Lead the architecture of modular validation mechanisms (email domain, ownership matching, document verification, enterprise SSO, registry integrations) as composable building blocks within the Work Profiles platform.
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar for data modeling, API design, and identity profile architecture across the organization.
• Lead the design of profile lifecycle management — issuance, expiration, revocation, and revalidation — ensuring profiles in users’ wallets remain accurate and auditable over time.
• Ensure security, privacy, and compliance requirements are built into the fabric of Work Profiles and Communities, with particular rigor for high-assurance regulated use cases.
• Contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions, representing the data and contract needs of Work Profiles and Communities in cross-functional technical forums.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a recognized technical authority for a complex domain spanning multiple systems.
• Deep expertise in data modeling — including designing schemas and relationship structures that remain correct, performant, and auditable at scale, particularly for entity-attribute and affiliation models.
• Proven track record designing and owning APIs and data contracts for source-of-truth systems used by internal and external consumers, including versioning, compatibility, and governance.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and drive alignment across engineering teams without direct authority.
• Experience designing configuration-driven or rules-driven systems where product behavior is defined by structured data rather than hardcoded logic.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or owning systems that model person-to-organization or person-to-credential relationships — including how affiliation evidence is structured, validated, issued, and reused across multiple downstream consumers.
• Experience designing platform systems intended to operate as a factory or self-service configuration layer — where new instances (communities, profiles, eligibility rules) can be created and deployed rapidly against a shared, well-modeled foundation.
• Expertise in NIST 800-63 IAL2/AAL2 standards, including evidence requirements, verification methods, and identity lifecycle management — particularly as they apply to organization-bound credentials and high-assurance regulated use cases.
• Experience with OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including designing and extending claims and scopes to surface organizational and affiliation attributes to relying parties.
• Hands-on experience with graph databases and the modeling tradeoffs between graph and relational representations of entity-attribute relationships at scale.
• Experience operating in regulated environments (financial services, healthcare, federal government) with security, compliance, or data privacy requirements.
• Familiarity with emerging identity and credentialing standards (Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers) and how they apply to organizational and professional credentials.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Excellent communication skills and a track record of influencing.