Senior Digital Identity / Credentials Developer – Full Stack

Client: Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement (Government Services Integration Cluster)

Job Title: Software Developer - Full Stack - Senior (Python + Digital Identity/Verifiable Credentials + ACA-PY)

Job Location: Onsite | 222 Jarvis St., Toronto

Contract Duration: 252.00 Days (Potential Extension)

Description

Must Have

• Please focus on the bolded technologies in the Responsibilities and Skills & Evaluation Criteria.

Responsibilities

• Develop and extend open-source Open Wallet Foundation ACA-PY, credential exchange protocols, DID resolution services, and secure messaging workflows.
• Implement credential lifecycle features - including issuance, presentation, revocation, and IETF Status List support - aligned with W3C Verifiable Credentials and decentralized identity standards.
• Build secure APIs and asynchronous services to support verification flows, trust framework compliance, and interoperability across issuers, holders, verifiers, and external systems.
• Apply strong security practices, implementing cryptographic operations, secure key management, and hardware-backed storage patterns.
• Ensure back-end integrations follow best practices for authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure data exchange.
• Support front-end user interfaces and admin dashboards that interact with credential services, ensuring usability, performance, and accessibility.
• Develop automated tests (unit, integration, API-level), participate in code reviews, and uphold high engineering standards across the stack.
• Collaborate closely with architects, DevOps, security specialists, and cross-ministry stakeholders to ensure end-to-end functional integrity.
• Document system designs, workflows, schema definitions, and operating procedures to support maintainability and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies, support milestone planning, and assist in troubleshooting distributed digital credential environments.

Skills & Evaluation Criteria

• In-depth development experience with JWT/JWS, PKI (X.509), OAUTH2, and SHA/SHA2.
• Design, develop, and maintain digital credentials platform and services that support the full digital credentials lifecycle (issuance, holding, presentation, revocation, and status checks), using Python as a primary development language.
• Developing and extending Open Wallet Foundation ACA-PY agents, credential exchange protocols, DID resolution components, and secure messaging workflows.
• Build and maintain credential status infrastructures, including IETF Status List implementations for revocation, suspension, and validity checking.
• Develop RESTful service APIs and asynchronous service components supporting verifiable credential exchange, credential verification, trust framework compliance, and interoperability with external systems.
• Implement secure interaction patterns between credential issuers, verifiers, and holders, ensuring compliance with decentralized identity standards, trust registries, and governance frameworks.
• Ensure compliance with global digital identity standards and/or specifications such as W3C Verifiable Credentials, IETF, PCTF, NIST, and eIDAS.
• In-depth understanding of security and protocols such as OIDC, OIDF OpenID4VC/OpenID4VP, W3C DC-API, OAuth2, JWT/JWS(JOSE), TLS, PKI, CBOR/COSE, ECDSA P-256, Ed25519, SHA/SHA2, and RSA.
• Knowledge of W3C verifiable credential data model, ISO/IEC 18013-X, ISO/IEC 23220-X (mDOC) and decentralized identifiers (DIDs).
• Contribute to standards adoption by evaluating new specifications (e.g., DIF, ToIP, IETF) and translating them into working production components.
• Integrate backend systems into broader enterprise and cross‑ministry ecosystems using REST APIs, event-driven services, and secure messaging systems.
• Contribute to containerized deployments using Docker and orchestrated environments such as Kubernetes.
• Develop automated unit, integration, and API-level tests to ensure robustness of digital credential workflows.
• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and quality engineering practices to ensure reliable and maintainable production systems.
• Ensure robust back-end interaction patterns including authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure data exchange.

Security, Cryptography & Trust Infrastructure - 10%

• Implement cryptographic operations for signing, encrypting, deriving proofs, and verifying credentials using libraries and standards relevant to decentralized identity.
• Apply modern secure coding practices in areas such as key management, hardware-backed storage, DID document handling, secure channel establishment, and credential integrity protection.
• Ensure systems follow enterprise security guidelines and trust framework requirements (e.g., PCTF, IETF, NIST, eIDAS), performing regular security updates and dependency patching.

Collaboration, Documentation & Agile Delivery - 10%

• Work closely with architects, developers, DevOps, automation engineers and security specialists to ensure end-to-end functional integrity across digital wallet, credentials issuer and credential verifier.
• Document system designs, credential workflows, schemas, data models, and operational procedures to support maintainability and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, refinement, retrospectives) and contribute to milestone planning for digital identity features.
• Support troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis across distributed digital credential environments.