Staff Software Engineer, ID.me

• Bachelor’s or Graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 8+ years of professional software development and data infrastructure experience, including 5+ years working deeply with PostgreSQL in high-volume production environments
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of PostgreSQL internals (e.g., MVCC, vacuuming, locking semantics, query execution plans, indexing structures, WAL, and replication)
• Strong programming proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Python, Ruby, or Java, alongside expert-level SQL and PL/pgSQL

Desirable

• ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (SDE5), PostgreSQL Specialist to lead the engineering, evolution, and operational excellence of our PostgreSQL-based data platform
• This role sits at the intersection of deep database internals and platform software engineering—focused on scaling our core relational databases (across CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS) and building the developer tooling, safe change deployment pipelines, and automated guardrails that protect ID.me’s mission-critical identity systems
• As a Staff Engineer on the Core Platform Data team, you will serve as the organization’s foremost technical authority on PostgreSQL internals, performance engineering, and safe database evolution at scale
• Beyond tuning queries and managing high-scale database infrastructure, you will act as a force multiplier for the entire engineering organization by designing and maintaining automated schema change pipelines, migration linters, and self-service guardrails that enable product engineers to ship database changes safely, rapidly, and without production disruption
• You will also lead high-stakes database engine upgrades, large-scale data migrations, and Change Data Capture (CDC) initiatives in partnership with Product Engineering, SRE, Security, and Compliance teams. This is a highly technical, hands-on role that combines deep mastery of PostgreSQL internals with strong software engineering skills to build resilient systems and developer-facing database automation
• Master & Optimize PostgreSQL Internals at Scale: Serve as the primary technical escalation point and subject-matter expert on PostgreSQL internals—including MVCC, vacuum/autovacuum tuning, transaction ID wraparound prevention, lock management, WAL/checkpoint behavior, buffer management, query planner/optimizer internals, and table/index bloat remediation
• Build Safe Change Deployment Pipelines & Developer Guardrails: Design, build, and maintain automated database schema change management pipelines (e.g., Liquibase/CI-CD workflows, automated DDL validation, lock/timeout guardrails, and pre-flight migration checks) that empower engineers across ID.me to deploy schema and data changes safely with zero downtime
• Lead Zero-Downtime Migrations & Engine Upgrades: Architect and execute complex, large-scale data migrations (accounting for data skew, batching, and index performance) as well as major version upgrades and platform transitions across PostgreSQL, GCP CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS
• Drive Query Performance & Schema Hygiene: Partner with engineering teams to review and optimize high-throughput queries, indexing strategies, partitioning/sharding designs, connection management, and role/permission models across operational and graph-adjacent relational workloads
• Engineer Database Observability & Diagnostics Tooling: Build and enhance custom PostgreSQL telemetry, statistics collection, query performance monitoring, and alerting to proactively detect lock contention, replication lag, slow queries, and capacity bottlenecks before they impact production SLAs
• Enable Event-Driven & CDC Architectures: Design and maintain reliable Change Data Capture (CDC), logical replication, and outbox/streaming integrations that bridge transactional PostgreSQL databases with ID.me’s broader event-driven and analytical data ecosystem
• Automate Governance, Security & Compliance: Build automated workflows and enforcement mechanisms for database access controls, cross-schema permissions, secret rotation, data retention/pruning, and regulatory compliance (e.g., FedRAMP, NIST 800-63, GDPR)
• Act as Production Stability Guardian & Multiplier: Establish and codify PostgreSQL best practices, conduct architectural and high-risk migration reviews, and mentor engineers across the company to decentralize database expertise and elevate the organization’s database engineering bar