Job description
We are seeking an exceptional Principal Software Engineer to be the chief architect and foundational builder of our decentralized digital identity system. This is a greenfield opportunity to design a global platform from first principles, engineered to support millions of users .
Your mission is to create a new paradigm for digital identity—one that is controlled by the user, inherently private, and universally verifiable. You will design a system that allows for the creation and exchange of secure, portable, and tamper-evident digital attestations. The core challenge is to build this system with radical efficiency, ensuring high availability and low latency at an extremely low operational cost. You will be the company's technical authority on digital identity, building the trust layer for all our products and for the web.
Key responsibilities
- Architect & Design: Lead the end-to-end architecture of the identity network. Design the core protocols for identity resolution, the data models for verifiable attestations, and the secure, privacy-preserving mechanisms for their exchange.
- Protocol Development: Go beyond existing identity frameworks. Design and implement the low-level protocols that govern how identities are created, updated, and verified across a large-scale, decentralized environment.
- Hands-on Implementation: Write, test, and deploy robust, high-performance systems code, primarily in Go or Rust. You will be a lead individual contributor, personally building the most critical components of the identity engine.
- Scalability & Performance: Engineer the system from day one for massive scale. This includes designing a high-throughput identity registry, optimizing verification processes for low latency, and ensuring the system remains performant under heavy load.
- Security & Privacy by Design: Embed security and privacy into every layer of the architecture. Implement and champion best practices for secure data handling, key management, and privacy-preserving techniques.
- Technical Leadership & Vision: Serve as the company's subject matter expert on identity and digital trust. Mentor other engineers, drive the technical roadmap, and articulate your architectural vision to the entire organization.
Qualifications
- Required:
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a deep focus on building large-scale, secure, distributed systems.
- Extensive experience in the digital identity space, with a strong understanding of identity protocols and digital trust frameworks (e.g., OpenID Connect, SAML, OAuth).
- Expert-level command of a systems programming language such as Go, Rust, or C++.
- Profound understanding of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), digital signatures, hash functions, and other core concepts of applied cryptography.
- A proven track record of architecting systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and massive user scale.
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Bonus Points (Preferred):
- Direct experience with emerging standards for decentralized identity (e.g., W3C DID, Verifiable Credentials).
- Experience designing and building systems that rely on tamper-evident or append-only data structures.
- Knowledge of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
- Contributions to open-source projects in the identity, security, or distributed systems space.
- A PhD in a relevant field such as Distributed Systems, Security, or Cryptography.
