Software Engineer - Developer Experience & AI Platform

Role Overview

We are seeking a Software Engineer (SDE3), Developer Experience and AI Platform to join our Core Platform Engineering organization at ID.me. In this role, you will bring a relentless automation and self-service mindset-passionate about "automating all the things" to eliminate operational friction and cognitive load across the engineering organization. You will build the tools, systems, and platforms that free up other engineers' time and context windows, making it effortless for them to build and ship software quickly while making it hard to break production.

ID.me is evolving as an API-first platform company, and everything we build on the Developer Experience and AI Platform team is superpowered by modern AI and Agentic AI tools and systems. As an SDE3 on this team, you will design and evolve programming-language-specific paved paths ("golden paths") that standardize service creation, CI/CD, observability, and security out of the box. Furthermore, you will build and integrate autonomous AI agents and agentic workflows (such as MCP integrations, RAG-powered developer context, and automated remediation pipelines) that progressively automate ongoing service ownership, upgrades, and maintenance tasks across ID.me's codebase.

This role is based out of our McLean, VA office and requires full-time in-office attendance.
Responsibilities

• Build Self-Service Platforms & Intelligent Guardrails: Design, build, and maintain internal developer tools, CLI utilities, Internal Developer Portal (IDP) workflows, and reusable GitHub Actions that make building and deploying services fast and intuitive-while embedding automated guardrails that make it hard for engineers to introduce breaking changes, security gaps, or compliance regressions.
• Develop & Evolve Language-Specific Paved Paths: Create and maintain opinionated, programming-language-specific "golden paths" (including project scaffolding, SDKs, shared libraries, container base images, and standardized CI/CD templates) that bake in production readiness, observability, and security best practices by default.
• Superpower Developer Workflows with AI & Agentic Systems: Build and operate AI-native developer platform capabilities-including Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers/registries, context-engineering and RAG pipelines, and AI coding assistant integrations-that optimize both human developer cognitive load and AI context windows.
• Automate Ownership & Maintenance with Autonomous AI Agents: Design and deploy autonomous and human-in-the-loop AI agents that automate recurring engineering ownership and maintenance toil-such as dependency and framework upgrades, vulnerability remediation, configuration migrations, automated test generation, and standards enforcement.
• Eliminate Toil & Manual Ticket Queues: Partner with product, infrastructure, SRE, and security teams to identify high-friction bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle and replace manual processes or ticket queues with 100% self-service automation.
• Own End-to-End Platform Features: Drive medium-to-large Developer Experience and AI Platform initiatives from technical design through rollout, adoption, and operational support, measuring impact via DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore) and developer satisfaction.
• Champion Enablement & Mentorship: Evangelize modern AI-augmented engineering workflows, write clear documentation, and mentor fellow engineers through code reviews, pairing, and enablement workshops.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 3+ years of professional software development experience building backend services, developer tooling, or platform automation.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Ruby, TypeScript/JavaScript, or Java) and ability to work across multiple language ecosystems to build language-specific tooling and paved paths.
• Demonstrated track record of using and building with modern AI and Agentic AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, LLM APIs, MCP servers, or agentic frameworks) to accelerate software delivery and automate engineering workflows.
• Deep passion for automation, self-service system design, and reducing cognitive load for other engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on a Developer Experience (DevEx), Internal Developer Platform (IDP), AI Enablement, or Platform Engineering team.
• Hands-on experience designing or building autonomous AI agents, custom MCP tools/servers, RAG systems, or LLM-powered CI/CD and code-maintenance workflows.
• Experience building programming-language-specific scaffolding, SDKs, linters, codemods, or standardized build/deployment templates across multiple languages.
• Strong familiarity with modern CI/CD platforms (especially GitHub Actions reusable workflows), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and Internal Developer Portals (e.g., Backstage).
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP or AWS) and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).
• Understanding of production observability (metrics, logs, traces) and embedding security/compliance guardrails (e.g., FedRAMP, SOC2, NIST) directly into developer pipelines.
• Systems-level thinking with strong written and verbal communication skills-able to champion standards through enablement and intuitive tooling rather than manual mandates.
• Demonstrated ownership of at least one significant platform tool, automation pipeline, or AI-enabled workflow from design through organization-wide adoption.

The annual base salary listed does not include a company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity and benefits which will be determined based on experience, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location and role.

ID.me offers comprehensive medical, dental, vision, health savings account, flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts), basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance, 401(k) with company match, parental leave, ability to participate in unlimited paid time off subject to the terms and conditions of the PTO policy, including 8 company wide holidays, short and long-term disability insurance, accident and critical illness insurance, referral bonus policy, employee assistance program, pet insurance, travel assistant program, wellbeing and childcare discounts, benefit advocates, and a learning and development benefit.

Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on qualifications, professional experiences, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location, and other job related factors.

Pay Range

$120,000-$159,000 USD