Technical Research Consultant, Identity Verification

Technical Research Consultant, Identity Verification

Position Type: Contract (3-6 months)

Location: Remote (U.S. Eastern time zone overlap required)

Team: Product Management

What You Will Do

Provider and Data-Source Research

• Identify identity-verification, authoritative-data, eID, document-verification, biometric, liveness, deepfake, fraud-signal, bank-verification, and related providers that can fill specific product requirements.
• Research regional options where global vendors may have weak coverage, with near-term emphasis on markets such as Southeast Asia and other priority international regions.
• Determine whether a provider is technically available and operationally usable, including production eligibility, onboarding requirements, per-customer approvals, geographic restrictions, licensing, minimums, and commercial dependencies.
• Separate vendor claims from verified evidence by using primary sources, technical documentation, independent benchmarks, public test results, standards, and hands-on validation.

Hands-On API Evaluation and Prototyping

• Integrate third-party REST APIs and SDKs in a sandbox or test environment using lightweight Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Postman, curl, or similar tools.
• Build small proof-of-concept applications or test harnesses that demonstrate what a provider actually returns, how difficult it is to integrate, and where failure modes appear.
• Evaluate API authentication, request/response structure, error handling, webhooks, latency, rate limits, sandbox-to-production differences, observability, documentation quality, and integration effort.
• Prototype fraud and biometric concepts when useful, such as connecting a deepfake-detection API and comparing its results against public or independently available test data.
• Document enough implementation detail that Product or Engineering can reproduce the test without starting over.

Country, Regulatory, and Operational Research

• Research how identity verification works in specific countries, including available government eIDs, authoritative sources, physical documents, identity attributes, and approved access models.
• Translate business requests into technical and vendor-evaluation criteria. Example: a request to support Singpass should become a documented view of integration options, approval requirements, entity prerequisites, production constraints, data flows, and implementation choices.
• Identify privacy, consent, data-residency, retention, licensing, certification, and local-government constraints that could affect architecture or time to market.
• Flag operational dependencies early, including manual-review requirements, provider onboarding lead times, customer-specific approvals, or compliance reassessment implications.

Coverage Intelligence and Change Monitoring

• Maintain a structured view of provider coverage by country, document type, electronic ID, authoritative source, and capability.
• Track new or changed identity-document templates and provider support so Product can anticipate verification failures rather than discover them only through customer escalations.
• Monitor vendor release notes, government identity programs, standards, API changes, and relevant product announcements, recording both the source and effective date.
• Create concise periodic updates that tell Product what changed, why it matters, and whether action is required.

Research Automation and Agents

• Build lightweight research agents or automated workflows that monitor defined sources, detect changes, preserve citations, and produce reviewable summaries.
• Automate repetitive research tasks such as checking supported-document lists, comparing vendor coverage, identifying newly released document templates, or watching government digital-ID programs.
• Design workflows so a human can verify the source and reasoning before research is used for a product or compliance decision.

Decision Support for Product

• Create a repeatable vendor scorecard covering coverage, technical fit, evidence quality, integration complexity, fraud controls, operational model, regulatory constraints, data handling, commercial considerations, scalability, and vendor maturity.
• Recommend whether 1Kosmos should integrate, partner, defer, or continue researching, and clearly state the evidence and assumptions behind the recommendation.
• Present findings in concise written briefs and working sessions with Product, Engineering, Security/Compliance, and other stakeholders.
• Maintain a research repository so prior work can be reused for roadmap planning, customer requirements, RFPs, and future vendor evaluations.

Requirements

You Are the Right Person for This Engagement If You Have

• Strong hands-on experience consuming third-party APIs and SDKs. You can go from documentation to a working test without needing a full engineering team.
• Comfort with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or a similar scripting language, plus REST/JSON, OAuth or API-key authentication, Postman, curl, Git, and basic cloud tooling.
• Excellent technical research skills and the discipline to distinguish primary evidence, independent testing, vendor marketing claims, and your own conclusions.
• Experience translating ambiguous business questions into structured evaluation criteria and defensible recommendations.
• Strong written communication. Your research should be concise enough for an executive while detailed enough for an engineer to reproduce the work.
• Experience presenting technical findings to Product, walking Engineering through API test results, and discussing regulatory constraints with Security or Compliance.
• High agency and comfort working independently in an environment where priorities can change quickly.
• Dependable collaboration overlap with the U.S. Eastern time zone.
• Experience in identity verification, KYC/KYB, fraud prevention, biometrics, digital identity, cybersecurity, fintech, payments, or trust and safety.

Additional Pluses

• Familiarity with government eID programs, mobile driver licenses, authoritative identity data, document verification, or identity-assurance standards.
• Experience evaluating biometric, liveness, presentation-attack, deepfake, or document-fraud technology.
• Experience researching international privacy, data-residency, consent, identity, or digital-government requirements.
• Experience building AI-assisted research agents, monitoring pipelines, web-scraping or change-detection workflows, or other research automation.
• Prior work in consulting, product management, solutions engineering, technical product research, or technical competitive intelligence.