Distinguished Engineer - Software Development

When you join Verizon You want more out of a career. A place to share your ideas freely — even if they're daring or different. Where the true you can learn, grow, and thrive. At Verizon, we power and empower how people live, work and play by connecting them to what brings them joy. We do what we love — driving innovation, creativity, and impact in the world. Our V Team is a community of people who anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins. In crisis and in celebration, we come together — lifting our communities and building trust in how we show up, everywhere & always. Want in? Join the #VTeamLife. What You' Ll Be Doing... As a Distinguished Engineer - Software Development, you will also be responsible for API First Platform technology roadmap and strategy serving as a top-tier individual contributor and lead software developer for our core identity platform and connected API services. The API First Platform (APIF) team builds, scales, and operates the shared software infrastructure powering our commercial and internal API products. This includes the high-performance authentication, authorization, policy, and consent services—alongside connected platform modules like BMO, TMF-931, provisioning, and API metrics—that handle every API request. You will be responsible for the following but not limited to: • Working alongside platform architects, this hands-on engineering role focuses on direct software execution, complex feature implementation, and software-level design. • Programming high-availability software components, establishing production reliability and debugging practices, drive developer enablement, and serve as the paramount technical escalation resource when critical production incidents require deep code and system diagnosis under pressure. • Building, testing and maintaining software applications/programs/ websites for internal and external use. • Conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining software components (excluding applications). • Be BOLD Standard: Acting with agility to solve real customer problems, practice thoughtful candor, and take ownership of delivering impactful, ethical outcomes over mere activity. • Leading technical discussions with platform architects, product owners, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable software designs for core IAM and API platform services. • Determining the structure, software design, and scope of high-availability microservices and backend components using modern strongly-typed programming languages. • Developing software components and testing frameworks, leading hands-on programming and code delivery to implement critical API First platform capabilities into production. • Providing guidance, standards, and technical escalation for diagnosing and resolving complex software, distributed database (CockroachDB), and cloud infrastructure issues during development and production incidents. • Ensuring project milestones are completed within specified timeframes by managing cross-service dependencies (including BMO, TMF-931, ESSO, and API Gateways) and prioritizing engineering execution. • Working with stakeholders to lead production deployments, operational readiness, and acceptance handoffs for platform software releases. • Mentoring engineers across the team, guiding technical onboarding, code reviews, debugging practices, and the adoption of modern AI-assisted engineering workflows. • Ensuring tight privacy, compliance, and security controls are embedded and maintained across all platform codebases, credentials, and access frameworks. • Serving as a subject matter expert regarding identity standards (OAuth2/OIDC, CIBA), distributed systems, and modern software practices to continuously improve platform reliability and performance. What We're Looking For... You will need to have: • Bachelor's degree or four or more years of work experience. • Eight or more years of relevant experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training. • Experience in modern backend software engineering, software programming capabilities in strongly-typed modern backend languages (TypeScript, Java, C++, Python, or Go). • Experience in implementing core identity patterns -OAuth2, OIDC, PKCE, client credentials, JWT, JWKS, CIBA, and ESSO/Strata. Even better if you have one or more of the following: • Experience in software engineering with demonstrated scope operating as a lead or senior technical software contributor on high-scale systems. • Distributed Systems & Database Execution: Hands-on production experience writing software against highly concurrent distributed databases (CockroachDB, Spanner, or equivalent), with deep knowledge of transaction isolation levels, query tuning, and hot-row mitigation. • Authentication & Identity Protocol Implementation: Direct software dev