Principal Software Engineer, Data
About The Position
ID.me is seeking a Principal Software Engineer (SDE6), Data, for its Core Platform Engineering organization. The role leads the architectural evolution of ID.me’s data ecosystem, assessing existing systems and defining a pragmatic, phased plan to move toward a resilient, scalable, cloud-native data architecture. The engineer will act as the primary technical strategist and hands-on architectural driver for the data side of the platform transformation, aligning technical execution with business outcomes across identity verification, fraud prevention, analytics, and AI/ML enablement. The position requires close partnership with executive leadership, product, security, compliance, and application engineering teams. It involves leading foundational data platform design and implementation, establishing data modeling and governance standards, embedding security and privacy requirements into architecture, and helping teams execute complex migrations and resolve high-severity technical challenges. The role 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.
- 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 ability to enter complex brownfield engineering environments, diagnose architectural and business challenges, and define and execute multi-quarter technical transformation roadmaps.
- Deep expertise designing, building, and evolving large-scale data architectures spanning relational databases such as PostgreSQL, 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 and turn ambiguous company-wide problems into actionable execution 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, including 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, retention, and privacy or encryption frameworks in regulated environments such as FedRAMP, NIST, SOC2, or GDPR.
- Fluency with AI-assisted engineering workflows and experience designing data architectures for AI/ML and analytical platforms.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex 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 the end-to-end architectural roadmap for the data ecosystem, with incremental milestones for evolving legacy patterns into scalable, API-first and event-driven architectures while delivering business value.
- Lead the technical design and implementation of foundational 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 mandates into data architectures and data contracts.
- Define organization-wide standards, paved paths, and self-service tooling for relational and graph data modeling, schema hygiene, metadata management, data lineage, and access patterns.
- Work with Security and Compliance teams to ensure data storage, encryption, retention, and access architectures meet regulatory standards and provide auditability.
- Work directly in critical codebases, build prototypes, lead architectural reviews, help teams execute complex migrations, optimize database and query performance, and resolve high-severity architectural challenges.
- Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, promote data ownership and stewardship practices, and align cross-functional teams around a unified data vision.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Health savings account and flexible spending accounts, including medical, limited purpose, dependent care, and 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 PTO policy, including eight 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.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
