Principal Tech Lead Manager - Data Platform & Reliability Engineering at ID.me
Mountain View, CA
$242,693–$275,400
Jul 12, 2026
Mountain View, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A dual technical and people leadership role responsible for the architecture, reliability, and day-to-day operation of high-throughput PostgreSQL clusters and a proprietary graph database at the core of a digital identity platform. The position involves driving SRE practices — including failover, disaster recovery, and zero-downtime migrations — while managing and growing a team of database, infrastructure, and platform engineers. It suits an experienced engineering manager with deep hands-on background in large-scale relational databases and platform reliability in regulated environments.
Principal level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
Advertised as Senior, but the requirements read as Principal.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 5,800 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 3,450–8,600
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
What the occupation pays Median $178,991 (middle half $141,096–$225,584).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
Location is not specified in the posting; the role appears to be remote-friendly based on ID.me's known distributed workforce, but no explicit remote/location statement was found — remote has been set to true as a best-effort inference.
This is a dual-hatted Tech Lead Manager role combining people management (hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews, team of 5–10+ engineers) with deep hands-on technical ownership of data infrastructure. 11-3021 (Computer and Information Systems Managers) was chosen as primary because people leadership is explicitly half the mandate; 15-1243 (Database Architects) is the close runner-up given the heavy architectural and reliability scope.
Seniority is assessed as Principal: the role owns org-wide data platform architecture AND carries full people-management authority over a team, placing it above a typical Senior or Staff individual contributor.
The advertised title 'Tech Lead Manager' carries no standard seniority level word, but the posting frames it as a senior leadership position; 'Senior' was chosen as the closest advertised band.
PostgreSQL is listed under Preferred Qualifications with the label 'Database Expertise: deep, hands-on experience…' — however, the role's core mandate (owning production PostgreSQL clusters) makes this a de facto hard gate; it has been marked required accordingly.
Engineering management (3+ years) and data/SRE/platform engineering (5+ years) are stated as explicit experience requirements in the Required Qualifications section. Because these are experience thresholds rather than named technologies, they are noted here rather than as standalone skills — the 8-year overall years minimum captures the overall floor.
FedRAMP, NIST, and GDPR compliance experience is called out as a responsibility but not listed as a hard gate in the qualifications sections; it is not emitted as a skill.
No compensation figures were provided in the posting.
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): engineering management, data engineering.
This posting reads as a fully-remote role, so it was scored against the national candidate pool rather than a single metro.
Read the full posting
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