Software Engineer, Systems

About the role

We're hiring a Staff Platform Engineer to build the core systems and infrastructure that power Keycard - from identity services and enforcement paths to the developer platforms and automation that let every engineer ship with confidence. Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity propagation, policy enforcement, audit logging, and runtime governance. You'll move up and down the stack - building Kubernetes operators and CI/CD automation one day, contributing to core product services the next. The systems you build need to provide deterministic guarantees around delivery, consistency, and availability, creating the leverage Keycard needs to deliver trusted agent-native experiences at global scale. You'll work directly with founders, product, design, and the engineers building our SDKs and core 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

• Strong distributed systems instincts. You have expertise in consensus, coordination, and state management, and you build systems that are secure, resilient, and fault-tolerant with best-in-class observability.
• You treat the path to production as a product surface. You create automation, pipelines, and developer platforms that make shipping reliable software the default - empowering every engineer to deliver quickly and with confidence.
• 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
• Experience with identity and access protocols (OIDC, OAuth, mTLS) and active engagement with emerging agent protocols like MCP and A2A.
• Background in edge computing, intelligent routing, or globally distributed systems - with ideas about how to make agent-native applications fast and resilient anywhere.
• Experience extending runtimes with eBPF, service meshes, custom Kubernetes operators, or plugin-driven architectures (WASM, dynamic policy engines).
• Hands-on experimentation with coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and strong opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them.

Benefits

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.

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