Senior Software Engineer, Online Data Stores

About Persona

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder — but more important — than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly.

We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry — that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Reddit relies on Persona for age assurance and verification to comply with online safety regulations, protecting younger users while maintaining a seamless experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live.

We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us!

About Persona

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder — but more important — than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly.

We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry — that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Coursera uses Persona to ensure the right person is earning each degree. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live.

We believe that making the internet safer and more human requires a team that reflects the diverse, global nature of the people we aim to serve. We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Online Data Stores team, a critical part of the Infrastructure team at Persona. You'll play a key role in building, maintaining, and evolving the data storage solutions that power our application stack. You will be instrumental in ensuring the scalability, reliability, and performance of these core systems. You'll collaborate closely with other engineering teams to optimize data storage solutions and define best practices, helping Persona scale effectively.

This is an opportunity to have a significant impact on the foundation of our platform and contribute to a growing company that's building the identity layer for the internet. You'll be working on challenging problems at scale, using cutting-edge technologies, and collaborating with a talented team of engineers. While Persona is based in San Francisco, the Infrastructure team is fully remote, with team members across the US and Canada.

What you'll do at Persona

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance, scalable, and secure data stores used across our application stack.

• Collaborate with infrastructure, platform, and application teams to optimize data storage solutions for performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency.

• Implement and advocate for best practices for data modeling, access patterns, monitoring, and incident response.

• Contribute to automation, observability, and proactive capacity planning to ensure operational excellence.

• Participate in code reviews, contribute to architectural discussions, and mentor junior engineers.

• Partner with other engineering teams to deliver on complex initiatives together.

• Develop simple, elegant solutions to complex problems.

• Embrace and champion engineering best practices within the product engineering teams.

• Work closely with product teams to plan and build scalable, resilient and cost-effective infrastructure systems that meet launch goals, reach new markets and scale with product demand.

• Directly shape system design, development methodologies, and implementation technologies

What you'll bring to Persona

• BA/BS in computer science, software engineering or equivalent experience

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on large-scale, distributed data systems.

• Strong technical expertise in designing and operating scalable data storage solutions, ideally with the technologies we use (MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis).

• Experience with cloud-native architectures and technologies, particularly Google Cloud (or equivalent cloud providers).

• Deep understanding of data consistency, replication, partitioning, and high availability strategies.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration systems like Kubernetes.

• Software development experience in general-purpose programming languages (Ruby, Go, Python, Java) with a preference for experience in Ruby on Rails and ORMs.

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to navigate ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a focus on cross-functional teamwork.

• Knowledge of and expertise in software engineering best practices for software development life cycle, including requirements gathering, design, coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations

Benefits and perks

Persona offers a wide range of thoughtful and inclusive benefits for this role, including medical, dental, and vision, 3% 401(k) contribution, unlimited PTO, quarterly mental health days, family planning benefits, professional development stipends, wellness benefits, unlimited paid time off, among others. While we believe competitive compensation and benefits are a critical aspect of you deciding to join us, we do hope you consider why our core values and culture are right for you. If you’d like to better understand what it’s like working at Persona, feel free to check out our reviews on Glassdoor.

Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging

At Persona, we strive to put diversity and inclusion at the forefront of everything we do, reflecting our core values. Our DEIB Employee Resource Group seeks to build a diverse and inclusive team that fosters an environment where each Personerd feels empowered to bring their unique differences to work and achieve their full innovative potential. Our hope is that by fostering such an environment, we strengthen our business and relationships by putting people first.

We strive to promote a culture that celebrates diversity and inclusiveness regardless of, but not limited to, race, gender, sexual orientation, family status, religion, ethnicity, national origin, physical disability, veteran status, or age.

Benefits and Perks

For full-time US-based employees (excluding internship and contractor opportunities), Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision, 3% 401(k) contribution, unlimited PTO, quarterly mental health days, family planning benefits, professional development stipend, wellness benefits, among others.

For full-time UK employees, Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including private medical insurance, dental insurance, a 6% employer pension contribution, unlimited PTO, a monthly wellness stipend, professional development stipend, co-working stipend, and more.

As part of our interview process, all candidates will be asked to verify their identity with Persona. This step is used solely to confirm that candidates are who they say they are, and will have no impact on hiring decisions.