Role Overview
ID.me is seeking a Software Engineer III to join the Trust Service team, where we build and operate the core infrastructure that decides how much trust to extend to every identity claim made by over 152 million members.
The Trust Service owns the Trust Graph, a structured record of identity inspections that captures what was verified and how reliably it was verified. Every access decision at 20 federal agencies, 44 state governments, 66 healthcare organizations, and hundreds of consumer brands depends on the identity and trust data our service produces.
As a Software Engineer III, you will work on a high-throughput, correctness-critical Java backend service at the heart of ID.me's identity platform. The work is backend-intensive and data-model-deep: you will design and evolve REST APIs, write precise database queries, and ship features that are used at production scale. You will be a key technical voice on how the trust data model evolves and how new inspection types, identity providers, and scoring rules land safely in production.
Key Responsibilities
Build & Ship Trust Graph Features: Design, implement, and evolve the Trust Service API end-to-end, from API contract design through database query authoring and production deployment. Independently drive small-to-medium features with minimal oversight, coordinating closely with the Identity, Platform, and consumer-facing product teams that depend on the trust chain.
Data Model & API Contract Ownership: Own the trust inspection data model and the REST API contract that downstream consumers and SDKs bind to. Make deliberate decisions about backwards compatibility, versioning, and the clean separation between public API shape and internal implementation details.
Correctness, Reliability & Performance: Ensure that trust reads and writes are correct under concurrent load. Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in database query plans. Own reliability improvements: observability, structured logging, alerting, and on-call response for a service that downstream teams depend on continuously.
Database & Integration Engineering: Write and review complex SQL queries against ID.me's identity graph schema. Collaborate with the platform team when underlying data contracts change, and ensure the trust service stays correctly decoupled from its data dependencies. Understand and navigate PostgreSQL semantics, schema migration risks, and safe deployment patterns.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with the Product engineering, Architects and Platform teams, the trust chain feeds risk decisions, audit queries, and downstream access grants. Bring a clear-eyed technical perspective to cross-team planning: surface contract risks early, write precise specs for new inspection types, and hold the line on data-model correctness when product velocity would otherwise cut corners.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
4+ years of professional software development experience with a strong emphasis on backend service engineering, preferably in Java or another JVM language.
Proficiency with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) and commitment to an AI-first engineering culture that leverages these tools to maximize code quality, test coverage, and engineering velocity.
Deep comfort with relational databases, writing complex SQL queries, reasoning about query plans, and working within a production database schema.
Experience designing and versioning REST APIs backed by OpenAPI specifications.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with modern Java (21+) and its type-safety features - records, sealed interfaces, pattern matching - applied to real production codebases.
Familiarity with graph or highly relational data models: understanding entity relationships, traversal patterns, and the tradeoffs of different read/write shapes.
Comfort reasoning about identity and trust decisions: what it means for a credential to be verified, how different verification methods vary in reliability, and how expiration or decay affects downstream trust.
Experience with identity standards such as NIST 800-63-3, OAuth2, or OpenID Connect.
Strong track record of shipping well-tested, production-quality backend features with careful attention to failure modes, rollback safety, and backwards-compatible schema changes.
Startup or high-growth company experience with a strong bias toward ownership and execution.
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.
Mountain View, CA Pay Range
$172,528-$201,375 USD
