Staff Software Development Engineer – Wallet - Authentication

ID.me • Mountain View, CA

7d • $194,000 - $253,000 • Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer for its Wallet - Authentication team. The team builds core sign-in, registration, and account management experiences used by more than 170 million members, including MFA, account recovery, password reset, MyWallet, and a real-time risk engine. Its work balances security against credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse with a low-friction experience and member trust.

As a backend and API technical anchor, this engineer contributes to the architecture of authentication services, data models, and APIs, and owns defined portions of the platform end-to-end. The role shapes API contracts used by internal teams and downstream relying parties, and turns complex security, risk, and identity requirements into reliable, scalable authentication services. The position is based in ID.me's Mountain View, California office, five days per week.

The engineer leads ambiguous technical initiatives from definition through deployment and post-launch evaluation; builds reusable, extensible services; owns API contracts and integrations; advances real-time risk and abuse mitigation; and improves production availability, correctness, observability, and incident response. The role also sets engineering standards, mentors engineers, collaborates with Product, Design, Security, Identity, and other engineering teams, and champions AI-first engineering practices using AI tools for design, code, testing, documentation, and review.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including deep expertise building and operating high-availability backend services and APIs at scale.
• Ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from definition through delivery with minimal oversight, set technical direction, and make sound architectural tradeoffs.
• Expert-level proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem, such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or Scala, with experience building and operating production services and APIs.
• Expertise designing, documenting, and evolving REST or GraphQL APIs and owning contracts used by internal teams, external consumers, and SDKs throughout their lifecycle.
• Strong command of relational databases and SQL, including schema design, query performance, and safe production schema evolution.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including caching, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architecture.
• Strong understanding of secure system design, including authentication, authorization, session and token handling, and defense against abuse.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor, demonstrated through at least one year of daily use, and commitment to an AI-first engineering culture.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, experience influencing technical direction across Product, Design, Security, and Engineering, and a track record of mentoring engineers and raising a team's technical bar.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or owning authentication and identity systems, particularly sign-in, registration, MFA, or account recovery.
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization standards such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT, or FIDO2/WebAuthn.
• Experience building, owning, or scaling fraud detection, real-time risk engines, or abuse mitigation systems.
• Familiarity with credential-handling security practices, including password storage, session management, token issuance, and rate limiting.
• Experience with event-driven architectures such as Kafka, SNS/SQS, or Pub/Sub and decoupled service communication patterns.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization, deployment pipelines, and API gateways such as Kong, Apigee, or AWS API Gateway.
• Experience owning and evolving platform APIs used by multiple internal teams and external customers throughout design, versioning, and deprecation.
• Experience in regulated or high-assurance domains such as government, healthcare, or financial services, where compliance requirements shape system design.
• Strong debugging and performance optimization skills in complex production systems.
• Startup or high-growth company experience, with a bias toward execution, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the architecture of services and APIs for sign-in, registration, MFA, account recovery, password reset, and MyWallet, and own defined platform areas end-to-end.
• Clarify requirements for high-ambiguity problems and drive initiatives from definition through deployment and post-launch evaluation.
• Design services for reuse and extensibility across member journeys, so new authentication methods and requirements can be configured rather than requiring rewrites.
• Design, document, and evolve REST and event-driven APIs for internal teams and downstream relying parties; own API contracts, versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation.
• Own integrations with MFA providers, email and SMS delivery services, internal identity services, and downstream relying parties, including reliability and failure modes.
• Advance the real-time risk engine and integrate it across authentication flows to mitigate credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse while minimizing friction for legitimate members.
• Drive step-up authentication, MFA challenges, and adaptive friction based on attempt risk; make safeguards configurable across member journeys.
• Develop data models and storage patterns for credentials, sessions, and account state across relational and other data stores.
• Apply caching, asynchronous and event-driven processing, and cloud-native patterns to maintain correctness, performance, and scalability.
• Improve production availability, correctness, observability, incident response, and post-mortems; participate in and strengthen the on-call rotation; and improve sign-in success rates, latency, and system health.
• Define patterns for service and API design, data handling, provider integrations, testing, and secure credential handling; establish code quality and CI/CD standards; conduct code reviews; and address technical debt.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through pairing, code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Security, Identity, and adjacent engineering teams; anticipate dependencies, resolve technical ambiguity, and contribute to roadmap and technical direction.
• Champion AI-first engineering practices and use AI tooling for design, code generation, test coverage, documentation, and review cycles.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 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 terms and conditions of the PTO policy.
• Eight company-wide holidays.
• Short- and long-term disability insurance.
• Accident and critical illness insurance.
• Employee referral bonus policy.
• Employee assistance program.
• Pet insurance.
• Travel assistant program.
• Wellbeing and childcare discounts.
• Benefit advocates.
• Learning and development benefit.

What This Job Offers

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