Principal Engineer - Work Profiles

About this role

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 https://network.id.me/ .

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 .

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-o

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