About the Role

ID.me is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to serve as the technical authority across the Work Profiles and Communities platforms the systems that define how individuals prove affiliation with organizations, institutions, and professional communities, and how that proof is structured, issued, and reused across ID.mes ecosystem.

Work Profiles and Communities are among ID.mes highest-growth domains. Work Profiles enables companies and government agencies to define precise eligibility criteria employees, contractors, licensed professionals, authorized signers and verify individuals against those rules at the right assurance level, from low-friction consumer offers to high-assurance regulated transactions (FDIC, IRS, HHS, SSA). Communities extends this capability to professional and brand communities: fitness professionals for Lululemon, trade contractors for Home Depot, corporate employees for Verizon. Together, these systems must scale to thousands of distinct profiles, support a validate once, reuse everywhere model across ID.mes partner network, and be deliverable to customer specification within weeks.

This role calls for deep expertise in data modeling and API design specifically how person-to-organization and person-to-credential relationships are represented, how eligibility rules and affiliation evidence are structured into queryable profiles, and how those profiles are issued to users wallets and federated via OIDC to downstream partners. You will own the data model strategy, API contract integrity, and long-term architecture for both platforms, and you will set the technical patterns that allow ID.me to scale community delivery into a high-velocity, self-service factory.

Youll partner closely with Product, Architecture, Identity, Security, Compliance, and enterprise customer teams to deliver a trustworthy, scalable foundation used by millions of members and hundreds of partners.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the data model strategy and long-term architecture for Work Profiles and Communities, including how person-to-organization, person-to-credential, and domain-to-organization relationships are represented, validated, and queried.
• Own the API contracts across both platforms including the Affiliation Profile API, Work Profile issuance and lifecycle APIs, and the OIDC extensions that surface organizational claims to downstream partners covering versioning, compatibility, and governance.
• Set technical direction and design standards for the domain, establishing the patterns that allow ID.me to deliver new community profiles to customer specification at scale and speed.
• Define and evolve the profile configuration model the eligibility rules, assurance tiers, validation mechanisms, and attribute mappings that power both self-service community creation and high-assurance enterprise use cases.
• Lead the architecture of modular validation mechanisms (email domain, ownership matching, document verification, enterprise SSO, registry integrations) as composable building blocks within the Work Profiles platform.
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar for data modeling, API design, and identity profile architecture across the organization.
• Lead the design of profile lifecycle management issuance, expiration, revocation, and revalidation ensuring profiles in users wallets remain accurate and auditable over time.
• Ensure security, privacy, and compliance requirements are built into the fabric of Work Profiles and Communities, with particular rigor for high-assurance regulated use cases.
• Contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions, representing the data and contract needs of Work Profiles and Communities in cross-functional technical forums.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a recognized technical authority for a complex domain spanning multiple systems.
• Deep expertise in data modeling including designing schemas and relationship structures that remain correct, performant, and auditable at scale, particularly for entity-attribute and affiliation models.
• Proven track record designing and owning APIs and data contracts for source-of-truth systems used by internal and external consumers, including versioning, compatibility, and governance.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and drive alignment across engineering teams without direct authority.
• Experience designing configuration-driven or rules-driven systems where product behavior is defined by structured data rather than hardcoded logic.
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Especially important for this role:

• Experience building or owning systems that model person-to-organization or person-to-credential relationships including how affiliation evidence is structured, validated, issued, and reused across multiple downstream consumers.
• Experience designing platform systems intended to operate as a factory or self-service configuration layer where new instances (communities, profiles, eligibility rules) can be created and deployed rapidly against a shared, well-modeled foundation.

Also valuable:

• Expertise in NIST 800-63 IAL2/AAL2 standards, including evidence requirements, verification methods, and identity lifecycle management particularly as they apply to organization-bound credentials and high-assurance regulated use cases.
• Experience with OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including designing and extending claims and scopes to surface organizational and affiliation attributes to relying parties.
• Hands-on experience with graph databases and the modeling tradeoffs between graph and relational representations of entity-attribute relationships at scale.
• Experience operating in regulated environments (financial services, healthcare, federal government) with security, compliance, or data privacy requirements.
• Familiarity with emerging identity and credentialing standards (Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers) and how they apply to organizational and professional credentials.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Excellent communication skills and a track record of influencing technical direction across an organization.