Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision and architecture for the Trust Service — the data model, the API surface, the query and write patterns, and the operational characteristics of the service at scale.
- Drive architectural decisions with a long view: make the system more correct, more observable, and easier to evolve without breaking consumers.
- Own the REST API contracts and inspection data model that downstream services, identity workflows, and product teams depend on.
- Lead decisions about versioning strategy, backwards compatibility, and the principles that govern how new inspection types and identity providers are introduced safely.
- Hold the line on contract integrity across teams.
- Serve as the technical anchor for the team. Setting the standard for code quality, system design, and engineering best practices.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance.
- Elevate how the team thinks about correctness, observability, and long-term maintainability.
- Partner with Identity, Authentication, Fraud, Workflow, Platform, and Compliance teams whose products are built on top of the trust chain.
- Drive alignment on shared data model decisions and multi-team API changes.
- Be the authoritative technical voice for what the Trust Service can and should do when adjacent teams bring new requirements.
- Own the availability and correctness of trust reads and writes at production scale.
- Lead initiatives around observability, alert hygiene, query performance, capacity planning, and incident response for a service that downstream teams depend on continuously.
- Ensure the service meets the security and compliance requirements of a NIST 800-63-3 IAL2/AAL2 credentialing system.
- Provide technical input into team and platform roadmap planning.
- Identify and advocate for engineering investments in reliability, data model flexibility, API ergonomics, and developer experience that improve the Trust Service as a platform and raise engineering velocity across the teams that depend on it.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating high-availability, correctness-critical backend services.
- Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from definition through delivery with minimal oversight.
- Deep comfort with relational databases — designing schemas, writing complex queries, reasoning about query performance, and managing safe schema evolution in production.
- Experience designing and versioning REST APIs and owning the contracts that downstream teams and SDKs depend on.
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) with a commitment to an AI-first engineering culture that maximizes team quality and velocity.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience influencing technical direction across engineering, product, and security stakeholders.
Nice to Have
- Deep experience with Java or another JVM language, including modern language features applied to production systems.
- Familiarity with graph or highly relational data models — entity relationships, traversal patterns, and the tradeoffs between different read/write shapes at scale.
- Comfort reasoning about identity trust decisions: what it means for an identity claim to be verified, how different inspection methods vary in reliability, and how temporal decay or expiration affects downstream access.
- Experience with identity standards such as NIST 800-63-3, OAuth2, or OpenID Connect, particularly in the context of federal or regulated-industry deployments.
- Proven ability to own and evolve platform APIs consumed by multiple internal teams — understanding the full lifecycle of a contract from design through versioning and deprecation.
- Track record of improving engineering culture through documentation, technical standards, architectural review, and developer experience improvements.
- Experience working in regulated industries such as government, healthcare, or financial services.
Team
Structure: Trust Service team
