Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL Specialist

Company Overview

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.

Role Overview

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.

This role is based out of our Mountain View, CA or McLean, VA offices and requires full-time in-office attendance.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Minimum Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven track record of building software, automation, and CI/CD pipelines for safe database schema changes, migrations, and developer guardrails.Demonstrated experience designing and operating automated database change management and schema migration frameworks (e.g., Liquibase, Flyway, custom DDL linters, or zero-downtime migration tooling) across a large engineering organization.
• Extensive hands-on experience managing and upgrading managed cloud PostgreSQL platforms at scale, particularly GCP CloudSQL, Google AlloyDB, AWS RDS, or Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Proven success planning and executing near-zero-downtime major PostgreSQL version upgrades and multi-terabyte table migrations or normalizations under strict availability SLAs.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL extensions, custom statistics/diagnostics tooling, logical replication, and Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines (e.g., Debezium, pglogical, Airbyte, or Pub/Sub/Kafka integrations).
• Experience automating database infrastructure and lifecycle management using Terraform, Kubernetes, or Helm.
• Strong understanding of data security, encryption, role-based access control, and compliance requirements in regulated environments (e.g., FedRAMP, NIST, GDPR).
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows to accelerate tooling development, query analysis, and migration validation.
• Track record of acting as a force multiplier—turning tribal database knowledge into self-service tools, documentation, and paved paths for other engineers.

The annual base salary listed does not include a company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity and benefits which will be determined based on experience, skills, education, relevant training, geographic location and role.

ID.me offers comprehensive medical, dental, vision, health savings account, flexible spending accounts (medical, limited purpose, dependent care, commuter benefit accounts), basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance, 401(k) with company match, parental leave, ability to participate in unlimited paid time off subject to the terms and conditions of the PTO policy, including 8 company wide holidays, short and long-term disability insurance, accident and critical illness insurance, referral bonus policy, employee assistance program, pet insurance, travel assistant program, wellbeing and childcare discounts, benefit advocates, and a learning and development benefit.

U.S. Pay Range

$174,000—$229,000 USD

Mountain View, CA Pay Range

$194,000—$253,000 USD

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.