Software Engineer III – Trust Service Team Software

Front Door Defense; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 172,528 - 201,375; Full time

Job summary

ID.me is seeking a Software Engineer III to join the Trust Service team in Mountain View, California. This role involves building and operating the Trust Service backend, focusing on identity verification systems.

Ideal candidates have 4+ years of backend engineering experience, particularly in Java, and a strong proficiency in SQL. Responsibilities include designing API contracts, ensuring reliability, and collaborating across teams for risk decisions.

This position offers a compensation range of $172,528 - 201,375 USD per year and contributes to a meaningful mission of secure digital identity.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software development experience, preferably in Java.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling.
• Deep comfort with relational databases and complex SQL queries.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and evolve the Trust Service API end-to-end.
• Ensure correctness, reliability, and performance of the trust reads and writes.
• Partner with various teams for cross-functional collaboration on risk decisions.

Skills

Backend service engineering (Java)

SQL query proficiency

API design and versioning

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Software Engineer III – Trust Service Team

Develop and scale the Trust Service backend to support identity decisions at scale

Location: Mountain View, California, United States

Compensation: $172,528 - 201,375 USD / year

About The Role

ID.me is the next-generation digital identity wallet that simplifies how individuals securely prove their identity online. Consumers can verify their identity with ID.me once and seamlessly login across websites without having to create a new login and verify their identity again. Over 152 million users experience streamlined login and identity verification with ID.me at 20 federal agencies, 44 state government agencies, and 66 healthcare organizations. More than 600 consumer brands use ID.me to verify communities and user segments to honor service and build more authentic relationships. ID.me's technology meets the federal standards for consumer authentication set by the Commerce Department and is approved as a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service provider by the Kantara Initiative. ID.me is committed to "No Identity Left Behind" to enable all people to have a secure digital identity.

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.