Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

Staff Data Engineer (SDE-V)

ID.me is seeking a Staff Data Engineer (SDE-V) to lead the design, build, and operation of the core data infrastructure that underpins our identity platform. This engineer will be responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of the systems that move, process, and store data across the company.

In this role, you'll own and operate key data infrastructure components — including event streaming platforms, relational databases, and batch processing systems — while driving automation and engineering best practices that improve data platform reliability and developer efficiency. You'll partner closely with Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, and Compliance teams to ensure ID.me's data ecosystem meets demanding operational, security, and regulatory requirements.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for a data infrastructure engineer who thrives at the intersection of distributed systems, platform engineering, and data operations.

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

Responsibilities

• Own and operate core data infrastructure, including event streaming, relational database, and batch processing platforms.
• Design and implement highly reliable, observable, and scalable data systems that enable real-time and batch data processing.
• Develop automation and guardrails for data governance, retention, and compliance, ensuring auditability and consistency across services.
• Partner with application, platform, and SRE teams to improve data access patterns, reliability SLAs, and recovery processes.
• Establish standards for data infrastructure monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning, ensuring proactive issue detection.
• Drive operational excellence by improving resilience, reducing toil, and implementing self-healing or automated recovery mechanisms.
• Evolve and optimize data pipelines that support downstream analytics, identity verification, and machine learning systems.
• Evaluate, implement, and operate event-driven and batch data platforms such as Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Dataflow, or Temporal.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for production data systems, contributing to postmortems and platform improvements.
• Mentor engineers and advocate for reliability-focused engineering culture across teams.
• Data lake architecture — Design and build the data lake storage and compute topology (object storage, partitioning, lifecycle, tiering) to support batch and streaming workloads.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of professional experience in data engineering, software engineering, or distributed systems development.
• 6+ years of programming experience in one or more languages such as Go, Python, or Java, with emphasis on automation and data system integration.

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. The above represents the anticipated total rewards package for this job requisition. 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

$217,565 - $260,000 USD

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.

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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