Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL Specialist

<div class="content-intro"><h2><strong>Company Overview</strong></h2> <p>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 175 million users experience streamlined login and identity verification with ID.me at 22 federal agencies, 50 state government agencies, and more than 100 healthcare organizations. Over 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 <a href="https://network.id.me/">https://network.id.me/</a>.</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At ID.me, we embrace the thoughtful use of AI tools in our daily work and there are even occasions where we leverage AI in our hiring process. However, during the interview process, we want to understand your individual skills and experiences. Therefore, we have guidelines on how AI can be appropriately used during your application and interviews which can be found <a href="https://insider.id.me/candidate-ai-use-in-interviewing/" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></p></div><h3><strong>Role Overview</strong></h3> <p>ID.me is seeking a <strong>Staff Software Engineer (SDE5), PostgreSQL Specialist</strong> to lead the engineering, evolution, and operational excellence of our <strong>PostgreSQL-based data platform</strong>. 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.</p> <p>As a Staff Engineer on the Core Platform Data team, you will serve as the organization’s foremost technical authority on <strong>PostgreSQL internals, performance engineering, and safe database evolution at scale</strong>. 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.</p> <p>This role is based out of our <strong>Mountain View, CA</strong> or <strong>McLean, VA</strong> offices and requires <strong>full-time in-office attendance</strong>.</p> <h3><strong>Responsibilities</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Master & Optimize PostgreSQL Internals at Scale:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Build Safe Change Deployment Pipelines & Developer Guardrails:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Lead Zero-Downtime Migrations & Engine Upgrades:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Drive Query Performance & Schema Hygiene:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Engineer Database Observability & Diagnostics Tooling:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Enable E