Role Overview

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer (SDE6), Data to join our Core Platform Engineering organization and spearhead the architectural evolution of ID.me’s data ecosystem. As ID.me scales as an API-first platform company, we need a high-agency technical leader who can immediately step in, rapidly synthesize our current landscape—across business objectives, technical realities, and system architecture—and define and drive a pragmatic, multi-phase evolution plan for our data platform and data architecture.

In this pivotal role, you will serve as the primary technical strategist and hands-on architectural driver for the Data side of ID.me’s platform transformation. You will assess existing relational, event-driven, and graph-based data systems, identify critical bottlenecks and strategic opportunities, and chart a clear path from our current state to a resilient, scalable, cloud-native target architecture. Rather than operating in an ivory tower, you will lead from the front—partnering closely with executive leadership, product, security, compliance, and application engineering teams to align technical execution with high-priority business outcomes across identity verification, fraud prevention, analytics, and AI/ML enablement.

This role is based out of our Mountain View, CA or McLean, VA office and requires full-time in-office attendance.

Responsibilities

• Assess & Synthesize Current State: Rapidly build a deep understanding of ID.me’s existing data landscape, technical debt, operational bottlenecks, and business priorities across relational databases (PostgreSQL/AlloyDB/CloudSQL), graph systems, event streaming, and core data APIs.
• Define & Drive the Data Evolution Plan: Author and own the end-to-end architectural roadmap for ID.me’s data ecosystem—defining clear, incremental milestones that safely evolve legacy patterns into modern, scalable, API-first and event-driven data architectures while continuously delivering business value.
• Architect Foundational Data Systems: Lead the technical design and implementation of core data platform capabilities, including foundational data APIs, event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub, streaming pipelines), graph data models, encryption/data protection services, and automated data lifecycle/retention systems.
• Bridge Business Objectives & Technical Strategy: Partner directly with executive leadership, product management, and domain architects (such as Authentication and Identity) to translate strategic business goals and regulatory mandates into cohesive, future-proof data architectures and data contracts.
• Establish Data Modeling & Governance Guardrails: Define organization-wide standards, paved paths, and self-service tooling for logical and physical data modeling (across relational and graph systems), schema hygiene, metadata management, data lineage, and access patterns.
• Embed Security, Privacy & Compliance by Design: Partner with Security and Compliance teams to ensure data storage, encryption, retention, and access architectures rigorously satisfy regulatory standards (e.g., FedRAMP, NIST 800-63, GDPR) with built-in auditability.
• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Dive into critical codebases, build foundational prototypes, lead architectural reviews, and work side-by-side with engineering teams to unblock complex migrations, optimize database and query performance at scale, and resolve high-severity architectural challenges.
• Influence & Elevate Engineering Culture: Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across the organization, evangelize modern data ownership and stewardship practices, and align cross-functional teams around a unified data vision.

Basic Qualifications

• 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 track record of stepping into complex, brownfield engineering environments, rapidly diagnosing architectural and business challenges, and defining and executing multi-quarter technical transformation roadmaps.
• Deep expertise in designing, building, and evolving large-scale data architectures spanning relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), distributed event-driven systems, and graph or NoSQL data stores.
• Strong proficiency in one or more modern backend programming languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, Ruby, or Rust) and advanced SQL.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven ability to act as a force multiplier across an engineering organization—driving alignment among executives, product leaders, and engineers to 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.
• Deep expertise with both relational database internals/scaling (e.g., PostgreSQL, AlloyDB, CloudSQL) and graph database architectures (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or similar) for relationship-driven identity and fraud use cases.
• Experience architecting event-driven data platforms and real-time streaming pipelines (e.g., Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, Dataflow, Temporal) on major cloud providers (GCP or AWS).
• Experience designing automated data governance, data retention, and privacy/encryption frameworks in highly regulated environments (e.g., FedRAMP, NIST, SOC2, GDPR).
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering workflows and experience designing data architectures that power AI/ML and analytical platforms.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a natural ability to distill complex architectural trade-offs into clear strategic narratives for both technical and executive audiences.