Principal Software Engineer - Developer Experience

Principal Software Engineer

We are seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer (SDE VI) to join our growing core platform engineering teams at ID.me. As a Principal Engineer, you'll lead the evolution of our Developer Experience (DevEx) strategy within the Engineering organization. This role is pivotal in shaping the tools, automation, and practices that empower our internal engineering teams to build, deploy, and maintain services efficiently and securely at scale.

ID.me is evolving as a platform company, embracing an API-first development strategy to deliver consistent, scalable, and reusable systems across its ecosystem. As a Principal Engineer on the Core Platform Engineering team, you will play a key role in realizing this vision—driving the architectural and strategic direction for developer enablement. You'll lead high-impact, cross-team initiatives, set engineering standards, shape platform interfaces, and design service lifecycle tooling that empowers teams to build and operate with speed, consistency, and confidence. Your close collaboration with infrastructure, security, and product teams will ensure a seamless, integrated developer experience across the organization.

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

Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership: Define and execute the long-term vision for Developer Experience, aligned with platform strategy, engineering velocity goals, and company-wide transformation efforts.
• Tooling & Automation: Architect and guide the development of internal tools, templates, and platforms that accelerate service creation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
• Standardization at Scale: Codify production readiness, security, observability, and compliance requirements into reusable frameworks and automation workflows.
• Developer Platform: Lead efforts to create and evolve the internal developer platform and service portal, enabling self-service capabilities and streamlined onboarding.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with product engineering, infrastructure, security, and SRE teams to ensure DevEx tooling integrates smoothly into the engineering ecosystem.
• Mentorship & Influence: Coach engineers across teams, drive architectural reviews, and champion DevEx best practices through documentation, workshops, and technical leadership.
• Measurement & Feedback: Establish metrics for developer experience (e.g., onboarding time, deploy success rates), gather feedback, and iterate on solutions based on real-world usage.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 15+ years of professional software development experience.
• Proficiency in a modern programming language (e.g., Java, Go, Python, Ruby, JavaScript).

Preferred Qualifications

• Software engineering experience, with deep expertise in developer tooling, internal platforms, or infrastructure.
• Proven track record in designing and delivering scalable internal tools, service scaffolding, CI/CD pipelines, or developer platforms.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), observability stacks, and secure software delivery pipelines.
• Exceptional ability to lead and influence across teams and roles, driving alignment and adoption of shared standards and tooling.
• Deep understanding of software lifecycle needs across diverse engineering environments (microservices, monorepos, APIs, etc.).
• Excellent communication, documentation, and system design skills.