Staff Software Development Engineer – Wallet - Authentication
ID.me Mountain View, CAfull timeRemotesenior$194k–$253kH1B: no
Idme Staff Software Development Engineer on the Wallet - Authentication team at ID.me builds core sign-in, registration, and account management experiences for over 170 million users. The role focuses on balancing security, usability, and trust in authentication flows.
Responsibilities
ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Wallet - Authentication team, which builds the core sign-in, registration, and account management experiences that over 170 million members rely on to access the ID.me identity wallet. Authentication is the front door to ID.me: every member journey begins with creating, signing into, or managing their Wallet. The team owns sign-in, registration, MFA, account recovery, password reset, and MyWallet, along with the real-time risk engine that keeps those flows secure, ensuring members can access their verified identity across numerous federal agencies, state governments, healthcare organizations, and consumer brands.
Authentication sits at the intersection of identity, security, and consumer experience. Every feature the team ships balances three concerns at once: security that defends against credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse; usability that keeps friction low so legitimate members get in quickly; and trust that gives members confidence their identity is protected. The team's real-time risk engine is central to this balance, adapting authentication requirements to the risk of each attempt. The experiences the team builds are reusable across every ID.me member journey, not purpose-built for a single relying party or use case.
As a Staff Software Development Engineer (P5), you will be a backend and API technical anchor for this team. You will contribute to the architecture of the services, data models, and APIs behind sign-in, registration, MFA, account recovery, and account management, and own defined portions of the authentication platform end-to-end. You will help shape the API contracts that internal teams and downstream relying parties depend on and serve as a go-to engineer for how authentication is built, secured, and scaled. The ideal candidate brings deep backend and API expertise, strong instincts for secure, high-availability distributed systems, and the ability to translate complex security, risk, and identity requirements into reliable, low-friction authentication services.
Qualification
Bachelor's degree in Computer ScienceProven ability to lead complexDemonstrated expertise designingExperience building
Required
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep expertise building and operating high-availability backend services and APIs at scale.
Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from definition through delivery with minimal oversight, setting technical direction and making sound architectural tradeoffs along the way.
Expert-level proficiency in a modern backend language and ecosystem (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Go, or Scala), with a track record of building and operating production services and APIs.
This position will work from our Mountain View, CA office five days per week.
Build & Own Authentication Services: Contribute to the architecture of the services and APIs behind sign-in, registration, MFA, account recovery, password reset, and MyWallet, and own defined portions end-to-end. Take loosely defined, high-ambiguity problems, clarify requirements with stakeholders, and drive initiatives from definition through deployment and post-launch evaluation. Design for reuse and extensibility across member journeys so that new authentication methods and requirements need configuration, not rewrites.
Design & Own APIs and Integrations: Design, document, and evolve REST and event-driven APIs that expose authentication capabilities to internal teams and downstream relying parties. Own the contracts and full lifecycle — versioning, backwards compatibility, and deprecation — for the APIs you own, holding a high bar for reliability, latency, and security. Ensure these interfaces integrate seamlessly across ID.me's ecosystem and remain a stable foundation others can build on. Own key integrations with MFA providers, email/SMS delivery services, internal identity services, and downstream relying parties, including their failure modes and reliability, and proactively surface issues and opportunities discovered during integration work.
Advance the Real-Time Risk & Abuse Mitigation Platform: Contribute to and evolve the team's real-time risk engine and drive its integration across authentication flows — detecting and mitigating credential attacks, account takeover, and abuse while preserving a low-friction experience for legitimate members. Drive step-up authentication, MFA challenges, and adaptive friction that respond to the risk of each attempt, and design these safeguards to be configurable across member journeys rather than specific to one flow. Treat security as a first-class concern in every system you design.
Data Models, Distributed Systems & Production Health: Develop robust data models and storage patterns for credentials, sessions, and account state across relational and other data stores. Apply distributed systems fundamentals — caching, asynchronous and event-driven processing, and cloud-native patterns — to keep authentication services correct, performant, and scalable. Help drive their availability and correctness at production scale, where an error is either a member locked out of their identity or a security exposure: raise the bar for observability, incident response, and post-mortems; participate in and strengthen the on-call rotation; and drive continuous improvement of sign-in success rates, latency, and system health.
Set Engineering Standards & Mentor Engineers: Serve as one of the technical leaders for the team's codebase. Define patterns for service and API design, data handling, provider integrations, testing, and secure credential handling. Establish code quality and CI/CD standards, conduct code reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the team. Improve the health of the codebase by identifying and addressing technical debt and strengthening shared foundations that accelerate the whole roadmap. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through pairing, code review, design discussions, and architectural guidance, creating team redundancy on the systems you own and growing the capabilities of the engineers around you.
Partner Closely with Product, Design, and Security: Work hand-in-hand with Product, Design, Security, Identity, and adjacent engineering teams to deliver cohesive auth experiences. Anticipate cross-system dependencies and help resolve ambiguity on technical approaches. Push back constructively when designs create security risk or undermine platform reusability, and contribute your perspective to the team's roadmap and technical direction.
AI-Forward Engineering: Champion AI-first engineering practices on the team, leveraging AI tooling for design, code generation, test coverage, documentation, and review cycles. Model and reinforce a culture where AI accelerates both individual productivity and team delivery.
Demonstrated expertise designing, documenting, and evolving REST or GraphQL APIs, and owning the contracts that internal teams, external consumers, and SDKs depend on across their full lifecycle.
Strong command of relational databases and SQL — schema design, query performance, and safe schema evolution in production — and of distributed systems fundamentals such as caching, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architecture.
Strong understanding of secure system design — including authentication, authorization, session and token handling, and defending production systems against abuse.
Proficiency with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) demonstrated by at least one year of daily use, in addition to a commitment to an AI-first engineering culture that leverages these tools to maximize code quality, test coverage, and engineering velocity.
Strong collaboration and communication skills, with experience influencing technical direction across Product, Design, Security, and Engineering, and a track record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar of a team.
Preferred
Experience building or owning authentication and identity systems — particularly sign-in, registration, MFA, or account recovery.
Experience implementing authentication and authorization standards such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT, or FIDO2/WebAuthn.
Experience building, owning, or scaling fraud detection, real-time risk engines, or abuse mitigation systems.
Familiarity with security best practices for credential handling — password storage, session management, token issuance, and rate limiting.
Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, SNS/SQS, Pub/Sub) and patterns for decoupled service communication.
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization, and deployment pipelines, and with API gateway technologies (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway).
Proven ability to own and evolve platform APIs consumed by multiple internal teams and external customers, across the full lifecycle from design through versioning and deprecation.
Experience in regulated or high-assurance domains such as government, healthcare, or financial services, where compliance requirements directly shape system design.
