Senior Software Engineer, Identity Graph Engineering San Francisco, California

Baselayer; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Hybrid in SF

Equity

Health/Dental/Vision

401(k) Match

Gym stipend

HSA contributions

In-person collaboration

Job summary

Baselayer is building the identity graph for US businesses and consumers, ingesting public records, sanctions lists, and more to power fraud detection and KYB onboarding. The senior engineer will own product features across the surface end-to-end: schema design, data ingestion, entity resolution, API endpoints, scope and multi-tenancy.

Based in San Francisco, the team works in a hybrid model with in-office presence four days per week.

Qualifications

• Shipped product features from ingestion to storage to API to customer, in production.
• Owned a Postgres schema that supports real money or real decisions, with active evolution.
• Strong async Python with experience running async services at scale.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise: schema design under live load, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and zero-downtime migration tooling.
• FastAPI (or close equivalent): shipped real APIs with auth dependencies, OpenAPI contracts, and structured response models.
• Built multi-tenant APIs with load-bearing access control at the data layer.

Responsibilities

• Ingest and normalize heterogeneous public records into the graph, owning the full pipeline: ingestion to normalizer to repository to API surface.
• Build and maintain entity resolution and linking systems - matching the same business or person across sources where keys don't line up, names are misspelled, and addresses are formatted six different ways.
• Design and ship customer-facing APIs for search, lookup, monitoring, and webhook delivery - built for engineers who'll be live in production within a day of signing up.
• Own schema design and zero-downtime migrations on a database hot 24/7.
• Optimize performance and scale: query patterns for high volume, ingestion pipelines with timely processing, API latencies that stay stable.
• Build multi-tenancy and access control: every query scoped by org/user/permission at the data layer.

Skills

Async Python

PostgreSQL

FastAPI

OpenAPI contracts

Multi-tenant APIs

API authentication

Performance optimization

Tools

PostgreSQL

OpenAPI

Cloud Run

Cloud Tasks

Cloud SQL

GCP

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Identity Graph

ABOUT BASELAYER

Every business in America needs a bank account to exist. The system that decides whether they're real, who's behind them, and whether they're a risk, runs on infrastructure from the 1980s. We're rebuilding that layer from scratch.

Baselayer is the identity layer for institutions across the United States — the most complete business graph in America and every human tied to it. We fuse public records, IRS data, sanctions lists, web signals, and fraud telemetry from 2,200+ financial institutions into a single graph that resolves any business and the humans behind it in milliseconds. The legacy credit bureaus took 50 years to build something that gets 60% match rates. We've built something that gets 98% in under two years.

Today we're trusted by over 20% of financial institutions in America — including FIS, Rho, Socure and leading loan infrastructure providers. But the graph is becoming infrastructure for anyone who needs to know if a business is real and worth trusting: gig platforms, marketplaces, AI companies, and commerce infrastructure at scale.

Trust is the substrate of every financial transaction. We're rebuilding it.

ABOUT THE TEAM

We're solving real-time entity resolution at a scale no one else has cracked — fusing dozens of data sources into a single business identity graph and resolving any entity in milliseconds. It's a graph AI problem, a retrieval problem, and a fraud-modeling problem stacked on top of each other. The technical depth is real.

You'd be joining a small team where the data moat is defensible, the research problems are open, and the infrastructure you build becomes load-bearing for businesses. Ownership is real. Velocity is real. There's no layer of process between an idea and shipping it.

We're at an inflection point — the graph is built, the match rates speak for themselves, and the hardest problems are still ahead: graph embeddings, fraud propagation models across the business network, real-time traversal at sub-100ms latency, and expanding the identity layer beyond finance into every platform that needs to trust a business.

If you want to work on something foundational — the kind of infrastructure that gets built once, and everything else runs on top of — this is it.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Baselayer is building the most comprehensive, accurate, and continuously-current identity graph of US businesses and consumers. Every entity, officer, address, relationship, and public record we can responsibly source - ingested, normalized, linked, and kept fresh. That graph powers fraud detection, KYB onboarding, portfolio monitoring, sanctions screening, and a growing surface of customer-facing API products. We're hiring a senior engineer to own product features across that surface end-to-end: schema design, data ingestion, entity resolution, API endpoints, scope and multi-tenancy, and performance under real customer load.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Ingest and normalize heterogeneous public records into the graph, owning the full pipeline: ingestion to normalizer to repository to API surface.
• Build and maintain entity resolution and linking systems - matching the same business or person across sources where keys don't line up, names are misspelled, and addresses are formatted six different ways.
• Design and ship customer-facing APIs for search, lookup, monitoring, and webhook delivery - built for engineers who'll be live in production within a day of signing up.
• Own schema design and zero-downtime migrations on a database hot 24/7.
• Optimize performance and scale: query patterns for 10x volume, ingestion pipelines that finish before the next batch arrives, API latencies that don't drift as the graph deepens.
• Build multi-tenancy and access control: every query in the system scoped by org/user/permission at the data layer.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

• Shipped product features that touched ingestion to storage to API to customer, end-to-end, in production.
• Owned a Postgres schema that real money or real decisions depended on, and stayed on top of its evolution.
• Strong async Python with experience running async services at scale.
• Deep Postgres expertise: schema design under live load, EXPLAIN ANALYZE as a reflex, zero-downtime migration tooling.
• FastAPI (or close equivalent): shipped real APIs with auth dependencies, OpenAPI contracts, and structured response models.
• Built multi-tenant APIs where access control is load-bearing and scoped correctly at the data layer.

WHAT SETS YOU APART

• Entity resolution / record linkage / fuzzy matching at scale.
• Search infrastructure - full-text, fuzzy, or vector - kept in sync with a Postgres system of record.
• Address parsing/normalization at country scale.
• Webhook delivery infrastructure: retries, signing, idempotency, and ordering guarantees.
• GCP experience with Cloud Run, Cloud Tasks, Cloud SQL, and batch pipelines.

WORK LOCATION

• Based in SF; hybrid 4 days per week in office.

COMPENSATION

• Salary Range: $230k – $340k + Equity

BENEFITS

• Time off when you need it: Flexible PTO so you can recharge without red tape
• In-person energy: We're based in SF and meet in the office 4 days a week
• Competitive compensation: We pay well and back it with equity. We want you to think and act like an owner
• Career rocket fuel: You'll help build the foundation of a high-growth startup, working side by side with experienced founders and team members who've done it before
• Benefits on us: We cover 100% of your health, dental, and vision premiums. No surprise deductions from your paycheck
• 401(k) with company match: We match your contributions so your future self benefits too
• HSA contributions included: We contribute to your HSA on applicable plans, so your coverage works as hard as you do
• Stay healthy, stay sharp: A $250 monthly gym stipend to help you bring your best self to work, and everywhere else
• A seat at the table: We believe in transparency, radical candor, and giving every team member a voice