Principal Engineer (Work Profiles)

Join <ID.me> as a Principal Engineer, where you will lead the data model strategy, API contract integrity, and long-term architecture for Work Profiles and Communities. You will collaborate closely with various teams to deliver a scalable foundation used by millions of members and hundreds of partners. Your expertise in data modeling, API design, and identity profile architecture will be crucial in driving the technical direction and design standards for the domain.

• Ownership of the data model strategy, API contract integrity, and long-term architecture for Work Profiles and Communities.
• Setting technical direction and design standards for the domain, establishing patterns that allow for scalable delivery of new community profiles.
• Leading the architecture of modular validation mechanisms and profile lifecycle management, ensuring compliance with security and privacy requirements.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and drive alignment across engineering teams without direct authority
• 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
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a recognized technical authority for a complex domain spanning multiple systems
• Experience designing configuration-driven or rules-driven systems where product behavior is defined by structured data rather than hardcoded logic
• 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
• 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 with OIDC and OAuth 2.0, including designing and extending claims and scopes to surface organizational and affiliation attributes to relying parties
• 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 operating in regulated environments (financial services, healthcare, federal government) with security, compliance, or data privacy requirements
• Hands-on experience with graph databases and the modeling tradeoffs between graph and relational representations of entity-attribute relationships at scale
• Familiarity with emerging identity and credentialing standards (Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers) and how they apply to organizational and professional credentials
• Excellent communication skills and a track record of influencing technical direction across an organization
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure)