Principal Software Engineer, Data

ID.me•McLean, VA

9h•$209,000 - $296,000•Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Principal Software Engineer (SDE6), Data, to lead the architectural evolution of its data ecosystem within the Core Platform Engineering organization. The role will rapidly assess the current data landscape across business objectives, technical realities, and system architecture, then define and drive a pragmatic, multi-phase plan for the data platform and data architecture. The engineer will serve as the primary technical strategist and hands-on architectural driver for the data side of ID.me’s platform transformation. This includes evaluating relational, event-driven, and graph-based systems; identifying bottlenecks and opportunities; and guiding the evolution toward a resilient, scalable, cloud-native architecture. The role partners with executive leadership, product, security, compliance, and application engineering to align technical work with business goals in identity verification, fraud prevention, analytics, and AI/ML enablement. This position is based in the Mountain View, California, or McLean, Virginia office and requires full-time in-office attendance.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
At least 10 years of hands-on experience in software engineering, distributed systems, and data architecture at a large-scale SaaS, fintech, identity, or platform company.
Demonstrated experience diagnosing architectural and business challenges in complex brownfield engineering environments and defining and executing multi-quarter technical transformation roadmaps.
Deep expertise designing, building, and evolving large-scale data architectures spanning relational databases, distributed event-driven systems, and graph or NoSQL data stores.
Strong proficiency in one or more modern backend programming languages, such as Go, Java, Python, Ruby, or Rust, and advanced SQL.

Nice To Haves

Ability to drive alignment among executives, product leaders, and engineers, turning ambiguous company-wide problems into actionable plans.
Hands-on experience leading large-scale data migrations, decomposing monolithic databases, and establishing API-first data boundaries and data contracts without disrupting mission-critical production traffic.
Expertise in relational database internals and scaling, such as PostgreSQL, AlloyDB, or CloudSQL, and graph database architectures such as Neo4j or Amazon Neptune for identity and fraud use cases.
Experience architecting event-driven data platforms and real-time streaming pipelines using technologies such as Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, Dataflow, or Temporal on GCP or AWS.
Experience designing automated data governance, data retention, and privacy and encryption frameworks in regulated environments such as FedRAMP, NIST, SOC 2, or GDPR.
Fluency with AI-assisted engineering workflows and experience designing data architectures that support AI/ML and analytical platforms.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architectural trade-offs to technical and executive audiences.

Responsibilities

Assess ID.me’s existing data landscape, technical debt, operational bottlenecks, and business priorities across relational databases, graph systems, event streaming, and core data APIs.
Own and drive an end-to-end architectural roadmap for the data ecosystem, with incremental milestones that evolve legacy patterns into scalable, API-first, event-driven architectures while delivering business value.
Lead the technical design and implementation of foundational data capabilities, including data APIs, event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, graph data models, encryption and data protection services, and automated data lifecycle and retention systems.
Partner with executive leadership, product management, and domain architects to translate business goals and regulatory requirements into cohesive data architectures and data contracts.
Establish organization-wide standards, paved paths, and self-service tools for relational and graph data modeling, schema hygiene, metadata management, data lineage, and access patterns.
Work with Security and Compliance teams to design data storage, encryption, retention, and access architectures that meet regulatory standards and provide auditability.
Provide hands-on technical leadership by working in codebases, building prototypes, leading architectural reviews, supporting migrations, optimizing database and query performance, and resolving significant architectural challenges.
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, promote modern data ownership and stewardship practices, and align cross-functional teams around a unified data vision.