Principal Engineer - Work Profiles

ID.me•Mountain View, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to serve as the technical authority across the Work Profiles and Communities platforms. These systems are crucial for defining how individuals prove affiliation with organizations and how that proof is structured, issued, and reused across ID.me’s ecosystem. Work Profiles and Communities are high-growth domains within ID.me. Work Profiles allows companies and government agencies to define precise eligibility criteria and verify individuals against these rules at the appropriate assurance level. Communities extends this to professional and brand communities. These systems must scale to support thousands of distinct profiles, enable a "validate once, reuse everywhere" model, and be deliverable to customer specifications quickly. This role requires deep expertise in data modeling and API design, focusing on representing person-to-organization and person-to-credential relationships, structuring eligibility rules and affiliation evidence, and federating profiles via OIDC. The Principal Engineer will own the data model strategy, API contract integrity, and long-term architecture for these platforms, setting technical patterns for high-velocity, self-service community delivery. Collaboration with Product, Architecture, Identity, Security, Compliance, and enterprise customer teams is essential to build a trustworthy and scalable foundation.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time as a recognized technical authority for a complex domain spanning multiple systems.
Deep expertise in data modeling, including designing scalable, performant, and auditable schemas and relationship structures, 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.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or owning systems that model person-to-organization or person-to-credential relationships, including evidence structuring, validation, issuance, and reuse.
Experience designing platform systems intended to operate as a factory or self-service configuration layer for rapid creation and deployment of new instances.
Expertise in NIST 800-63 IAL2/AAL2 standards, including evidence requirements, verification methods, and identity lifecycle management, particularly for 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.
Hands-on experience with graph databases and 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 their application to organizational and professional credentials.
Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
Excellent communication skills and a track record of influencing technical direction across an organization.

Responsibilities

Own the data model strategy and long-term architecture for Work Profiles and Communities, including representation, validation, and querying of person-to-organization, person-to-credential, and domain-to-organization relationships.
Own the API contracts across both platforms, including the Affiliation Profile API, Work Profile issuance and lifecycle APIs, and OIDC extensions for surfacing organizational claims.
Set technical direction and design standards for the domain, establishing patterns for scalable and rapid delivery of new community profiles.
Define and evolve the profile configuration model, including eligibility rules, assurance tiers, validation mechanisms, and attribute mappings.
Lead the architecture of modular validation mechanisms as composable building blocks within the Work Profiles platform.
Mentor staff and senior engineers, improving data modeling, API design, and identity profile architecture.
Lead the design of profile lifecycle management (issuance, expiration, revocation, revalidation) to ensure accuracy and auditability.
Ensure security, privacy, and compliance requirements are integrated into Work Profiles and Communities, especially for high-assurance use cases.
Contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions, representing the data and contract needs of Work Profiles and Communities in cross-functional forums.

Benefits

Comprehensive medical, dental, vision
Health savings account
Flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts)
Basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance
401(k) with company match
Parental leave
Unlimited paid time off subject to the terms and conditions of the PTO policy, including 8 company wide holidays
Short and long-term disability insurance
Accident and critical illness insurance
Referral bonus policy
Employee assistance program
Pet insurance
Travel assistant program
Wellbeing and childcare discounts
Benefit advocates
Learning and development benefit