Principal Tech Lead Manager - Data Platform & Reliability Engineering

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 .

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 log in across websites without needing to create a new login and re-verify. Over 140 million users experience streamlined login and identity verification with ID.me across federal, state, healthcare, and consumer brand networks. ID.me’s technology meets strict federal standards for consumer authentication (NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2) , driving our commitment to “No Identity Left Behind”.

Role Overview

ID.me is seeking a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) to lead and scale our Data Platform Team , with a heavy emphasis on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Data Reliability . This team acts as the core service owner for ID.me's high-throughput PostgreSQL database clusters and our critical, in-house Identity Trust Graph Database .

In this dual-hatted role, you will own the full technical architecture and people leadership mandate for the data platform tier. You will bridge the gap between deep infrastructure reliability and platform engineering, guiding a team of engineers to ensure our operational and analytical data layers meet strict SLAs for uptime, performance, data freshness, and compliance. The ideal candidate brings a strong systems-engineering mindset, deep expertise in managing large-scale relational databases, and a passion for building robust, self-healing data infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Data Infrastructure & Reliability: Define and evolve the technical architecture and operational standards for ID.me's data platform, focusing heavily on the performance, scale, and high availability of production PostgreSQL database clusters and our in-house graph database.

• Drive SRE Practices for Data Tier: Implement robust mechanisms for database clustering, replication, failover, disaster recovery, automated provisioning, and zero-downtime migrations.

• Performance Engineering & Optimization: Monitor, optimize, and scale platform services to meet strict requirements for query latency, throughput, and cross-region availability. Guide data model and schema design across relational and graph architectures.

• Lead Engineering Execution: Drive roadmap delivery across the team—setting priorities, removing operational blockers, and ensuring the team builds reliable data tools and automation. Balance short-term operational fire fighting with long-term platform health and technical debt reduction.

• Team Leadership & Talent Development: Recruit, hire, mentor, and retain a high-performing team of database, infrastructure, and platform engineers. Conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations that foster a culture of ownership and technical excellence.

• Security, Governance & Compliance: Partner with Security, Privacy, and Compliance engineering to enforce rigorous data governance, data minimization, lineage tracking, and access controls. Ensure infrastructure strictly complies with regulatory frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST, and GDPR.

• AI-Forward Operations: Champion AI-first practices across the team, leveraging AI tooling for automated test coverage, incident analysis, quick-start documentation, and infrastructure script generation.

Required Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Leadership Experience: 8+ years of total software/infrastructure engineering experience, with at least 3 years explicitly in an engineering management or tech lead manager capacity leading teams of 5–10+ engineers.

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, site reliability, or platform engineering .

Preferred Qualifications

• Software Development Track Record: Previous track record of running or leading a regular software development or feature team (building backend APIs, business logic, or customer-facing applications) is a major plus.

• Graph Database Experience: Familiarity or hands-on experience with graph database concepts, optimization, and technologies (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune) or custom-built graph layers.

• Streaming & Pipelines: Ex

Similar jobs

• Tech Lead Manager, Data Infrastructure — Cartesia · *HQ - San Francisco, CA
• Technical Lead Manager, Data Engineering, Trust & Safety — Openai · San Francisco
• Tech Lead Manager, Data Engineer — Waymo · Mountain View, CA
• Director of Platform & Reliability Engineering — Forgeglobal · New York, New York, United States
• Director of Platform & Reliability Engineering — Forgeglobal · San Francisco, California, United States
• Software Technical Lead Manager, Infrastructure — Waymo · Mountain View, CA, US
• Technical Program Manager - Data Operations Lead — Zoox · Foster City, CA
• Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform — Sentilink · Remote