Staff Backend Graph Engineer

Socure; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Socure is seeking a Staff Engineer to define the technical direction for the Identity Graph platform. You will own end-to-end architecture, collaborating across Engineering, Data Science, Product, and Security to ship production systems that protect millions of people at scale.

Lead architecture decisions, drive performance and cost improvements, and mentor engineers while ensuring privacy and security are built into every system from day one.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field
• 7+ years building and running distributed systems in the cloud, with at least 2 at Staff or Senior Staff scope, or the equivalent
• Production scale you can quantify. You can tell us what you built, how big it was, and how much you improved latency, reliability, or cost
• Deep Spark, Kafka, or Flink experience in both batch and streaming, including debugging them in production
• Low-latency serving. You have built and tuned APIs where milliseconds matter
• Graph or entity-resolution experience. You have modeled connected data, matched records across noisy sources, or built an identity graph. Fraud or identity verification is a strong plus
• Cloud and operations fluency. AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and real production observability
• ML data pipelines on Databricks, SageMaker, or similar, plus orchestration with Airflow or equivalent
• Technical leadership. You have led ambiguous, cross-team work, mentored engineers, and changed the direction of a system through design docs and influence, not authority

Responsibilities

• Shape the graph by defining schemas, relationships, and ontology for identity data
• Own entity resolution at scale and determine how records and devices connect
• Build for speed and volume with batch and real-time pipelines and low-latency APIs
• Power fraud intelligence with production ML features, model inference, and graph analytics
• Move the numbers by improving performance, reliability, and cost with measurements
• Set the direction by leading architecture decisions and documenting tradeoffs from design to production
• Raise the bar by mentoring engineers and setting standards for code reviews, tests, CI/CD, and operations
• Protect identity data by building privacy, security, and PII protections into every system

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Mentor engineers

Cross-team collaboration

On-call experience

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science / Data Engineering

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Airflow

AWS

Kubernetes

EMR

Neo4j

Amazon Neptune

Job description

Why Socure?

Socure is building the identity trust infrastructure for the digital economy — verifying 100% of good identities in real time and stopping fraud before it starts. The mission is big, the problems are complex, and the impact is felt by businesses, governments, and millions of people every day.

We hire people who want that level of responsibility. People who move fast, think critically, act like owners, and care deeply about solving customer problems with precision. If you want predictability or narrow scope, this won’t be your place. If you want to help build the future of identity with a team that holds a high bar for itself — keep reading.

About the Job

Build the graph that decides who’s real. Every day, Socure’s Identity Graph helps businesses decide whether to trust the person on the other side of a screen. It links billions of signals (names, addresses, devices, emails, phones) into one picture of identity, and it does this in milliseconds. Fraudsters move fast. The graph has to be faster.

As a Staff Engineer on this team, you’ll set the technical direction for the platform behind that decision. You’ll own hard problems end to end, work across Engineering, Data Science, Product, and Security, and see your work shape the products that protect millions of people.

What You Will Do

• Shape the graph. Define the schemas, relationships, and ontology that make identity data consistent and extensible.

• Own entity resolution at scale. Decide how records, people, devices, and addresses connect, and how confident we are, across data that is messy, sparse, and sometimes adversarial.

• Build for speed and volume. Design batch and real-time pipelines, low-latency APIs, and serving systems that hold up under heavy load.

• Power fraud intelligence. Ship the production systems behind our ML features, model inference, and graph analytics.

• Move the numbers. Improve performance, reliability, and cost, and prove it with measurements.

• Set the direction. Lead architecture decisions, document the tradeoffs, and carry initiatives from first design through production rollout.

• Raise the bar. Mentor engineers and set the standard for design reviews, testing, CI/CD, and operations.

• Protect identity data. Build privacy, security, and PII protection into every system from day one.

• Your toolkit:Java, Scala, or Python. Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, and AWS, including EMR. Graph technologies like Neo4j and Amazon Neptune.

What You Will Bring

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field

• 7+ years building and running distributed systems in the cloud, with at least 2 at Staff or Senior Staff scope, or the equivalent

• Production scale you can quantify. You can tell us what you built, how big it was, and how much you improved latency, reliability, or cost

• Deep Spark, Kafka, or Flink experience in both batch and streaming, including debugging them in production

• Low-latency serving. You have built and tuned APIs where milliseconds matter

• Graph or entity-resolution experience. You have modeled connected data, matched records across noisy sources, or built an identity graph. Fraud or identity verification is a strong plus

• Cloud and operations fluency. AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and real production observability

• ML data pipelines on Databricks, SageMaker, or similar, plus orchestration with Airflow or equivalent

• Technical leadership. You have led ambiguous, cross-team work, mentored engineers, and changed the direction of a system through design docs and influence, not authority

What This Job is Not

• It’s not a role for someone who hasn’t owned a system end to end in production, including being on call for it.

• It’s not feature work on platforms someone else designed.

• It’s not a defined backlog. You’ll frame ambiguous problems yourself.

• It’s not a place to treat data privacy as a compliance checkbox.

Socure is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity in all its forms within our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you need an accommodation during any stage of the application or hiring process—including interview or onboarding support—please reach out to your Socure recruiting partner directly.

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