Principal Tech Lead Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Own Data Infrastructure & Reliability: Define and evolve the technical architecture and operational standards for ID.me's data platform, focusing heavily on the performance, scale, and high availability of production PostgreSQL database clusters and our in-house graph database.
• Drive SRE Practices for Data Tier: Implement robust mechanisms for database clustering, replication, failover, disaster recovery, automated provisioning, and zero-downtime migrations.
• Performance Engineering & Optimization: Monitor, optimize, and scale platform services to meet strict requirements for query latency, throughput, and cross-region availability. Guide data model and schema design across relational and graph architectures.
• Lead Engineering Execution: Drive roadmap delivery across the team—setting priorities, removing operational blockers, and ensuring the team builds reliable data tools and automation. Balance short-term operational fire fighting with long-term platform health and technical debt reduction.
• Team Leadership & Talent Development: Recruit, hire, mentor, and retain a high-performing team of database, infrastructure, and platform engineers. Conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations that foster a culture of ownership and technical excellence.
• Security, Governance & Compliance: Partner with Security, Privacy, and Compliance engineering to enforce rigorous data governance, data minimization, lineage tracking, and access controls. Ensure infrastructure strictly complies with regulatory frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST, and GDPR.
• AI-Forward Operations: Champion AI-first practices across the team, leveraging AI tooling for automated test coverage, incident analysis, quick-start documentation, and infrastructure script generation.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 8+ years of total software/infrastructure engineering experience, with at least 3 years explicitly in an engineering management or tech lead manager capacity leading teams of 5–10+ engineers.
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, site reliability, or platform engineering.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous track record of running or leading a regular software development or feature team (building backend APIs, business logic, or customer-facing applications).
• Familiarity or hands-on experience with graph database concepts, optimization, and technologies (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune) or custom-built graph layers.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis) feeding into relational or non-relational datastores.
• Background working within highly secure or regulated industries (e.g., FinTech, HealthTech, GovTech) handling highly sensitive personal data.
• Deep, hands-on experience architecting, managing, tuning, and maintaining highly available production PostgreSQL database clusters at scale.
• Proven background in data reliability engineering, site reliability engineering, or core data platform engineering. Deep familiarity with setting up production SLAs/SLOs, automated alerting, and incident response systems.
• Strong experience with at least one major cloud platform (preferably AWS) and cloud-native ecosystem tools, including Kubernetes, Terraform, and Helm.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to translate complex database infrastructure and reliability needs into clear, actionable goals for product teams and executives.