Methods are provided for managing hierarchically organized subscriber profiles. According to one embodiment, a policy engine of a VR defines services available to subscribers in terms of profile identifiers. A scalable subscriber profile database is established having a memory requirement dependent upon the number of available service contexts by hierarchically organizing profile identifiers as leaf profile identifiers, which explicitly define services, and intermediate profile identifiers, which indirectly represent services. The policy engine receives a first-level profile identifier and determines whether it is among those stored in the database. If not, then it obtains service profile information associated with the first-level profile identifier. If the first-level profile identifier is an intermediate profile identifier having leaf profile identifiers, then it further obtains them and associated profile information and stores this information in the database. The first-level profile identifier and the associated service profile information are also stored in the database.