Skip to main content
Back to jobs

Software Engineer, Identity

External
keycard-labs logoKeycard-labs · Remote
Full-timeRemote4w ago
HerokuOAuth
Cover LetterConnect

Prepare for this interview

Elite

AI-generated questions, company research, and talking points tailored to this role

About the role

We're hiring a Staff Identity Engineer to design and build the core identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard - the infrastructure that lets agents prove trust, enforce policy, and operate autonomously at global scale. Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity propagation, policy enforcement, audit logging, and runtime governance. The systems you build need to be dynamic, multi-tenant, and fast - delivering auth decisions in under 10ms across cloud, edge, and hybrid deployments. Your work will span from core distributed services to the SDKs and APIs that developers use, ensuring a seamless, trusted experience end to end. You'll work directly with founders, product, design, and the engineers building our SDKs and platform services. You'll also help shape how we use agents internally - contributing to how Keycard becomes an agent-native engineering organization, not just a company that builds for one.

Requirements

  • You have deep experience building and operating identity, authentication, and authorization systems. You understand OAuth, SCIM, OIDC, mTLS, and related primitives - and you treat them as products, not just infrastructure.
  • Strong distributed systems instincts. You design for security, multi-tenancy, and reliability, with clear thinking about consensus, transactionality, and extensible data models.
  • You're a programmer first - fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages, comfortable moving across the stack from core systems and infrastructure to SDKs and APIs.
  • You thrive in 0→1 environments. You make hard trade-offs to ship today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, and you use iteration to accelerate the learning loop.
  • You lead by example - raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow. You communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.
  • Strong Candidates May Also Have
  • Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and strong opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them.
  • Experience designing extensible systems - WASM, plugin frameworks, dynamic policy engines - so developers and organizations can tailor platforms to their needs.
  • A track record of designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics that other developers depend on.
  • Contributions to open source identity, security, or CNCF projects, or experience building and shaping developer ecosystems.

Benefits

Truly Agent-Native Culture: At Keycard, we don't just enable others to adopt agents - we use them ourselves to build. You'll help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage.Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) give you the security to focus on building - and the asymmetric upside of ownership in a company chasing a category-defining mission.Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, plus 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to fully recharge.Tools That Keep You Ahead: AHealth insuranceDental insuranceVision insurancePaid time offEquity / stock options

Additional Information

About Keycard At Keycard , we're building identity & access infrastructure for the agent-native era -where software isn't static, but a dynamic, constantly changing system of AI agents working on behalf of people and businesses to complete dynamic tasks at runtime. Our mission is to unlock the agent economy by empowering developers and enterprises with the secure, scalable foundations they need to build, deploy, adopt, and trust agentic applications . To do this, we're building the real-time, in-band, contextual guardrails required to transition from human-driven to truly autonomous and agentic workflows that give users, builders, and security teams the confidence and control they need to bring agents out of the lab and into production. At our core, we're laser-focused on delivering a delightful, best-in-class developer experience that gives them the tools they need to create category-defining applications and experiences while giving platform and security teams the security, scalability, visibility, control, and enablement they need to accelerate their organizations journey to becoming agent native. We're a small, distributed team of repeat founders and builders, with backgrounds from Snyk , Auth0 , HashiCorp , and Heroku . Joining Keycard now means helping define not just our technology, but also the culture and company we're building together-during a once-in-a-generation platform shift.

Your Match

How well this role fits your profile.

Company Intel

What employees say

Worked at keycard-labs? Share your experience

Interested in this role?

Apply on the company's website.

Cover LetterConnect