Software Development Engineer VI - Shared Services

Role Overview

The Software Development Engineer VI will play an instrumental role in shaping the digital account experience for over 100 million ID.me customers and building the identity layer of the internet. 

The Shared Services team at ID.me is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining foundational services that power engineering teams across the organization. This team focuses on data encryption and event processing, ensuring that these critical components operate securely, efficiently, and at scale. By developing robust shared services, the team enables multiple engineering teams to focus on feature development while ensuring compliance, reliability, and seamless system coordination. The team acts as the backbone of the engineering platform, supporting multiple teams by providing scalable and reliable infrastructure. 

We are looking for a very experienced Principal Engineer to lead our Shared Services team and assume technical ownership to drive the team’s vision, architecture, and engineering excellence. They will mentor engineers, define and uphold technical standards, and ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of shared services. They will collaborate closely with internal product engineering teams to build solutions that streamline development and support company-wide initiatives. Additionally, they will partner with Product Management to align technical decisions with business objectives, prioritize initiatives, and drive strategic impact. This is a high-impact leadership opportunity to shape the foundation of our engineering platform and contribute to the success of multiple teams.

The position will work from our Mountain View, CA office five days per week.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain data encryption services, ensuring secure storage, transmission, and access control across multiple engineering teams.
• Build and maintain event-driven architectures that enable real-time data processing, analytics, and distributed coordination across systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define best practices for shared services standards across engineering.
• Develop, articulate, and iterate a long-term vision, and deliver impactful results through key milestones (i.e., days/weeks vs months), with a high bias for action.
• Raise the bar for technical excellence, engineering best practices, testing strategies, and distributed system design through pairing, mentoring, architecture / code reviews, technical presentations, and knowledge sharing sessions.
• Exert significant influence on the overall vision and long-term goals of the company by co-leading roadmap planning with engineering and product leadership.
• Own end-to-end deliverables through committing quality code and overseeing the work of others, with sound judgment to know what is appropriate.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field of study.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and implementing scalable shared services for data encryption and/or event-driven systems.
• Experience in developing and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
• 16+ years developing web applications using Java, Ruby, Javascript, Go, Python, or C++.
• Significant level of ownership of systems, architecture, and designing a technical roadmap and proven expertise building Platforms.
• Proven experience creating and driving technical roadmap(s), working with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other technical leaders to make tradeoff and prioritization decisions.
• A proven track record of successfully building and owning distributed systems and services at scale by incorporating containers, cloud native services, and infrastructure as code driven tooling.
• Proven ability to lead a team through up-leveling its automated testing skills and posture.
• Experience moving an organization forward in best practices around tracking, observability, monitoring, and alerting.
• Deep understanding of web technologies, frameworks, programming design patterns and paradigms, and APIs.
• Mastery of databases, queues, and caching systems in a cohesive architecture with experience using various technologies in the right circumstances and the ability to communicate tradeoffs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Masters degree and/or PhD in Computer Science or related field of study.
• Excellent leadership and mentorship abilities with exceptional oral and written communication skills, and a self-managing work ethic.
• Solid understanding of A/B testing strategies with the ability to design experiments, debug detect anomalies, and interpret results.
• Solid understanding of cryptography, access control mechanisms, and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, NIST, GDPR, etc.).
• Experience with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance and an understanding of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
• Experience with data retention and data governance.
• Experience working in a startup environment.
• Experience with account management and user data preferences specifically with data lifecycle management. 
• Experience with Hashicorp Nomad/Vault/Consul/Terraform.
• Experience using automated deployment and verification strategies.
• A passion for automated testing as a lever to increase quality and predictability for the entire ecosystem