Staff Software Development Engineer - Person API

📋 Description

• • Own the architecture, design, and delivery of Id.me’s Person API—the critical identity layer that authenticates and enriches 100+ million user profiles across government, healthcare, retail, and financial-services partners. You will shape how millions of Americans prove who they are online, making digital services more accessible while protecting sensitive PII.
• • Lead a cross-functional pod of 6-10 backend, data, and security engineers in building highly-available, low-latency microservices (Go, Kotlin, Postgres, DynamoDB, Kafka) that must sustain 50K+ requests per second with five-nines uptime. You will drive technical strategy, set coding standards, and perform rigorous architecture reviews to ensure every line of code meets SOC 2, FedRAMP High, and NIST 800-63-3 controls.
• • Translate complex product requirements into scalable domain models and RESTful/GraphQL endpoints that surface attributes such as legal identity, military affiliation, student status, and government benefits eligibility. You will partner daily with product managers, privacy counsel, and compliance teams to balance feature velocity with regulatory constraints like HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA.
• • Champion a culture of observability and reliability by instrumenting services with OpenTelemetry, defining SLIs/SLOs, and automating chaos testing in Kubernetes (EKS). When incidents occur, you will run blameless post-mortems and turn lessons learned into resilient runbooks that reduce MTTR to minutes, not hours.
• • Evolve our event-driven architecture to stream real-time identity updates to downstream systems (Snowflake, Salesforce, Braze) while guaranteeing exactly-once semantics and end-to-end encryption. You will evaluate emerging standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials and OpenID Connect 2.0 to future-proof our platform.
• • Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through pair programming, architecture deep-dives, and quarterly career-growth plans. You will model inclusive leadership, sponsor under-represented groups in tech, and help scale our engineering ladder so every teammate sees a clear path to Staff and Principal levels.
• • Optimize for cost and carbon footprint by tuning autoscaling policies, adopting Graviton-based instances, and leveraging Spot Fleets where appropriate. You will present quarterly metrics to executive leadership showing how technical choices translate into millions of dollars saved and measurable sustainability gains.
• • Collaborate with security researchers and external auditors to implement cutting-edge privacy-preserving techniques—selective disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, and confidential computing—so users control exactly what data they share and with whom. Your work will be cited in conference talks and white-papers that influence the broader identity industry.
• • Contribute to Id.me’s open-source initiatives (repositories, SDKs, and IaC modules) that accelerate community adoption and establish the company as a thought leader in decentralized identity. You will review community PRs, shepherd major releases, and represent Id.me at meetups and standards bodies.
• • Drive quarterly OKRs that align engineering output with business impact: reducing onboarding friction by 20 %, cutting identity fraud losses by 30 %, or expanding addressable market through new IAL2/AAL2 assurance levels. You will present board-ready narratives that tie technical milestones to revenue growth and customer NPS.