Principal Tech Lead Manager - Data Platform & Reliability Engineering

ID.me • Mountain View, CA

29d • Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) to lead and scale our Data Platform Team, with a heavy emphasis on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Data Reliability. This team acts as the core service owner for ID.me's high-throughput PostgreSQL database clusters and our critical, in-house Identity Trust Graph Database. In this dual-hatted role, you will own the full technical architecture and people leadership mandate for the data platform tier. You will bridge the gap between deep infrastructure reliability and platform engineering, guiding a team of engineers to ensure our operational and analytical data layers meet strict SLAs for uptime, performance, data freshness, and compliance. The ideal candidate brings a strong systems-engineering mindset, deep expertise in managing large-scale relational databases, and a passion for building robust, self-healing data infrastructure.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Previous track record of running or leading a regular software development or feature team (building backend APIs, business logic, or customer-facing applications) is a major plus.
• 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.

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.

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
• ability to participate in 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
• a learning and development benefit

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal