Technical Research Consultant, Identity Verification

Summary: The ideal candidate must move quickly from an identity-verification concept to evidence. Find the right providers and data sources, test them hands-on, document market and regulatory constraints, and give Product clear recommendations backed by working prototypes and traceable research.

Why 1Kosmos?

1Kosmos builds identity verification and authentication technology used by enterprises and government organizations. Our Identity Verification product spans physical identity documents, electronic IDs, authoritative data sources, biometrics, fraud signals, and reusable verified identity.

The market changes constantly. Governments release new identity documents and digital IDs, vendors add or retire APIs, fraud techniques evolve, and regional rules determine whether a technically viable integration can actually be used in production. We need a technically capable researcher who can keep pace with those changes and turn them into product decisions.

About the Engagement

This is a three-to-six month consulting engagement embedded with the Identity Verification Product team. You will investigate providers, integrate and test APIs, build lightweight prototypes, evaluate market and regulatory constraints, and leave behind reusable research systems rather than one-off reports.

The role is remote. Reliable overlap with the U.S. Eastern time zone for Product-team collaboration is required.

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.

Example Initial Research Queue

Priorities will change during the engagement, but representative assignments include:

• Evaluate bank-account and identity-data providers such as Plaid for verification use cases and determine the most appropriate integration pattern.
• Identify and test document-verification and authoritative-source providers for Southeast Asian markets.
• Research Singpass and other national eID programs, including production approval requirements and customer-specific constraints.
• Evaluate eID and mobile-ID aggregation options and determine where direct government integrations versus aggregators make sense.
• Compare DMV/AAMVA-like authoritative-source options and third-party aggregators for U.S. identity verification.
• Prototype and evaluate deepfake or biometric fraud-detection providers, including tools such as Paravision or comparable specialist vendors.
• Build a repeatable process for detecting new identity-document templates and tracking when upstream providers add support.

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.