Staff Software Development Engineer – Wallet - Authentication

ID.me•Mountain View, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer to join the Wallet - Authentication team, which builds core sign-in, registration, and account-management experiences used by more than 170 million members. The team owns sign-in, registration, MFA, account recovery, password reset, MyWallet, and a real-time risk engine. Its work balances security against credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse with usability and member trust across ID.me’s member journeys. The Staff Software Development Engineer (P5) will be a backend and API technical anchor, contributing to the architecture of authentication services, data models, and APIs and owning defined parts of the platform end-to-end. The role shapes API contracts used by internal teams and downstream relying parties, and translates security, risk, and identity requirements into reliable, scalable, low-friction services. The position is based in ID.me’s Mountain View, California office five days per week. ID.me is a next-generation digital identity wallet that enables people to prove their identity online and use it across websites and organizations. Its technology meets federal consumer authentication standards and is approved as a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service provider by the Kantara Initiative. ID.me describes its mission as “No Identity Left Behind.” The company offers medical, dental, and vision coverage; health savings and flexible spending accounts; life and disability insurance; a 401(k) with company match; parental leave; unlimited paid time off subject to policy terms; company-wide holidays; and additional insurance, employee assistance, referral, travel, wellbeing, childcare-discount, and learning and development programs. The listed annual base salary range for Mountain View, California and New York, New York is $194,000–$253,000 USD. Final offers may vary based on qualifications, experience, skills, education, training, location, and other job-related factors.

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.
Proven 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.
Demonstrated expertise designing, documenting, and evolving REST or GraphQL APIs and owning their contracts across the full lifecycle for internal teams, external consumers, and SDKs.
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 defending production systems against abuse.
At least one year of daily use of AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code or Cursor, and commitment to an AI-first engineering culture.
Strong collaboration and communication skills, including experience influencing technical direction across Product, Design, Security, and Engineering.
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 such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, containerization, deployment pipelines, and API gateway technologies such as Kong, Apigee, or AWS API Gateway.
Experience owning and evolving platform APIs consumed by multiple internal teams and external customers through design, versioning, and deprecation.
Experience in regulated or high-assurance domains such as government, healthcare, or financial services, where compliance shapes system design.
Strong debugging and performance-optimization skills in complex production systems.
Startup or high-growth company experience and a strong 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 portions end-to-end.
Clarify loosely defined, high-ambiguity problems with stakeholders and lead initiatives from definition through deployment and post-launch evaluation.
Design authentication services for reuse and extensibility across member journeys, allowing new methods and requirements to 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 and their lifecycle, including versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation, while maintaining high standards for reliability, latency, and security.
Own integrations with MFA providers, email and SMS delivery services, internal identity services, and downstream relying parties, including their failure modes and reliability.
Evolve the real-time risk engine and integrate it across authentication flows to detect and mitigate credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse while keeping legitimate-member experiences low-friction.
Drive step-up authentication, MFA challenges, and adaptive friction based on the risk of each attempt, with safeguards configurable across member journeys.
Treat security as a first-class concern in system design.
Develop data models and storage patterns for credentials, sessions, and account state across relational and other data stores.
Apply distributed-systems fundamentals, including caching, asynchronous and event-driven processing, and cloud-native patterns, to maintain correctness, performance, and scalability.
Improve production availability and correctness by strengthening observability, incident response, post-mortems, on-call practices, sign-in success rates, latency, and system health.
Set technical patterns and standards for service and API design, data handling, provider integrations, testing, and secure credential handling.
Establish code quality and CI/CD standards, conduct code reviews, address technical debt, and strengthen shared engineering foundations.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through pairing, code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance.
Partner with Product, Design, Security, Identity, and adjacent engineering teams to deliver cohesive authentication experiences and resolve technical ambiguity and dependencies.
Provide technical direction and constructively challenge designs that introduce security risks or undermine platform reusability.
Champion AI-first engineering practices, using AI tooling for design, code generation, test coverage, documentation, and review cycles.

Benefits

Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Health savings account
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
Referral bonus policy
Employee assistance program
Pet insurance
Travel assistance program
Wellbeing and childcare discounts
Benefit advocates
Learning and development benefit