What are the responsibilities and job description for the Engineering Manager - Credential API position at ID.me?
Company Overview
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, 45 state government agencies, and 70 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. To learn more, visit https://network.id.me/.
Role Overview
ID.me is seeking an Engineering Manager – Credential API to lead, architect, and operationalize our core credentialing platform: the API and services that issue, manage, and retrieve validated credential bundles (e.g., verified passports, driver's licenses, validated domains, verified faces) for persons and organizations.
In this role you will own the product-engineering lifecycle for the Credential API: definition, delivery, reliability, performance, and evolution. You will partner with identity/verification systems, platform teams, security & compliance, and external partners to deliver a world-class credentialing service at scale.
This position is based full-time in our Mountain View, CA office (with in-office presence expected).
Key Responsibilities
- Define and drive the Strategy and Roadmap for the Credential API and related services: issuance, retrieval, lifecycle management (creation, renewal, revocation) of credential bundles.
- Own the architecture, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and operational excellence of the credential services stack.
- Lead and grow a team of senior engineers (and likely immediate reports) accountable for the design, implementation, monitoring, and maintenance of the services and APIs.
- Partner deeply with Product Management, Identity & Verification teams, Security, Compliance (e.g., NIST 800-63-3, Kantara, etc.), and Partner Engineering to convert business, regulatory, and partner requirements into production systems.
- Define data modelling and storage strategy for credential attributes, provenance, relationships (graph relational document & attribute store) and ensure robust schema evolution, versioning, and interoperability.
- Establish standards and best practices for API versioning, documentation, developer experience, service lifecycle, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and SLA/SLI definitions.
- Design and oversee the integration of external identity/attribute validation vendors, partner systems, and internal verification services (face recognition, domain validation, driver's license/passport proofing) into the credential pipeline.
- Manage the operational readiness and health of the Credential API systems: high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, incident response, root cause analysis, replay of validation events, etc.
- Advocate for and implement emerging identity/credentialing standards (e.g., Verifiable Credentials (VCs), Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), trust frameworks) to ensure our platform remains forward-looking.
- Mentor, coach, and develop engineering leaders and individual engineers within the team, fostering a culture of high-quality code, technical rigor, and measurable impact. Make hiring decisions, set team goals, track metrics (team, system, business), and continuously improve engineering processes (agile, CI/CD, code reviews, DevOps culture).
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).
- 8 years of software engineering experience, building and operating large-scale, public-facing APIs and backend services at high scale. 3 years managing engineering teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in the digital identity, credentialing, or verification space (identity proofing, attribute verification, trust scoring).
- Familiarity with credential & identity standards: Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, DID/VC ecosystems, SAML, OIDC.
- Strong background in API design (REST and/or GraphQL), backend systems architecture, data stores (relational, NoSQL, graph), and cloud-native services.
- Deep understanding of security, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT), data privacy, encryption, and compliance frameworks.
- Proven ability to translate business and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions and lead them to production.
- Excellent leadership, communication and collaboration skills: able to influence cross-functional stakeholders and drive alignment.
- Experience with API gateway and service mesh technologies (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Istio).
- Proven track record with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SNS/SQS) and asynchronous workflows at scale.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm).
- Prior experience in regulated industries (government, financial, healthcare) with adherence to standards like FedRAMP, GDPR, NIST.
- Contributions to open-source or technical communities around backend platform engineering, API standards, or identity frameworks.
ID.me is a full-time, in-office culture. Unless a specific job description explicitly states otherwise, all roles are on-site five days per week at one of our offices in McLean, VA; Mountain View, CA; New York City, NY; or Tampa, FL. Certain roles — such as field-based sales or other remote-by-design positions — may have different work arrangements as noted in their individual postings.
ID.me maintains a work environment free from discrimination, where employees are treated with dignity and respect. All ID.me employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling our commitment to equal employment opportunity. ID.me does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. ID.me adheres to these principles in all aspects of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, promotion, benefits, social and recreational programs, and discipline. In addition, ID.me's policy is to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works. Upon request we will provide you with more information about such accommodations.
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