Principal Engineer - Work Profiles

Company Overview

ID.me is the next-generation digital identity wallet that simplifies how individuals securely prove their identity online. Consumers can verify their identity with ID.me once and seamlessly login across websites without having to create a new login and verify their identity again. Over 152 million users experience streamlined login and identity verification with ID.me at 20 federal agencies, 45 state government agencies, and 70+ healthcare organizations. More than 600+ consumer brands use ID.me to verify communities and user segments to honor service and build more authentic relationships. ID.me’s technology meets the federal standards for consumer authentication set by the Commerce Department and is approved as a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service provider by the Kantara Initiative. ID.me is committed to “No Identity Left Behind” to enable all people to have a secure digital identity. To learn more, visit

ID.me is a full-time, in-office culture. Unless a specific job description explicitly states otherwise, all roles are on-site five days per week at one of our offices in McLean, VA; Mountain View, CA; New York City, NY; or Tampa, FL. Certain roles — such as field-based sales or other remote-by-design positions — may have different work arrangements as noted in their individual postings.

At ID.me, we embrace the thoughtful use of AI tools in our daily work and there are even occasions where we leverage AI in our hiring process. However, during the interview process, we want to understand your individual skills and experiences. Therefore, we have guidelines on how AI can be appropriately used during your application and interviews which can be found here.

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.me’s ecosystem.

Work Profiles and Communities are among ID.me’s 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.me’s 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.

You’ll 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.
• Bachelor’s 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.

The annual base salary listed does not include a company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity and benefits which will be determined based on experience, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location and role.

ID.me offers comprehensive medical, dental, vision, health savings account, flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts), basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance, 401(k) with company match, parental leave, ability to participate in unlimited paid time off subject to the terms and conditions of the PTO policy, including 8 company wide holidays, short and long-term disability insurance, accident and critical illness insurance, referral bonus policy, employee assistance program, pet insurance, travel assistant program, wellbeing and childcare discounts, benefit advocates, and a learning and development benefit.

Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on qualifications, professional experiences, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location, and other job related factors.

Mountain View, CA Pay Range

$214,972—$307,125 USD

ID.me maintains a work environment free from discrimination, where employees are treated with dignity and respect. All ID.me employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling our commitment to equal employment opportunity. ID.me does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. ID.me adheres to these principles in all aspects of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, promotion, benefits, social and recreational programs, and discipline. In addition, ID.me's policy is to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works. Upon request we will provide you with more information about such accommodations.

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