Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States. On-site five days per week.

Salary: $217,565–$271,000 USD annual base salary, excluding bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

hirify.global provides a digital identity wallet and identity verification platform used by government agencies, healthcare organizations, consumer brands, and more than 152 million members.

What you will do

• Own the technical vision and architecture of the Trust Service, including the Trust Graph, data model, API surface, query patterns, and operational characteristics.
• Design and maintain REST API contracts, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and safe introduction of new inspection types and identity providers.
• Lead complex technical initiatives across Identity, Authentication, Fraud, Workflow, Platform, and Compliance teams.
• Drive reliability, correctness, observability, query performance, capacity planning, alert hygiene, and incident response for production services.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and architectural guidance while setting standards for engineering quality and maintainability.
• Influence platform roadmaps and advocate for investments in data model flexibility, API ergonomics, reliability, and developer experience.

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.
• Deep experience with relational databases, including schema design, complex queries, query performance, and safe production schema evolution.
• Experience designing and versioning REST APIs and owning contracts used by downstream services and SDKs.
• Ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives, influence engineering, product, and security stakeholders, and communicate effectively in writing and verbally.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor.

Nice to have

• Deep experience with Java or another JVM language and modern production language features.
• Experience with graph or highly relational data models, including entity relationships and traversal patterns.
• Knowledge of identity trust decisions, NIST 800-63-3, OAuth2, or OpenID Connect.
• Experience evolving platform APIs used by multiple internal teams and working in government, healthcare, or financial services.
• Experience improving engineering culture through documentation, technical standards, architectural reviews, and developer experience initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, in-office work environment with five days per week onsite.
• Medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, commuter, life, disability, accident, and critical illness coverage.
• 401(k) with company match, parental leave, unlimited paid time off subject to policy, and company-wide holidays.
• Learning and development benefit, employee assistance program, pet insurance, travel assistance, wellbeing, and childcare discounts.
• AI-assisted engineering tools are used thoughtfully in daily work and hiring processes.