Keycard
Identity & Access Management
SoftwareEngineer,Identity
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Lead candidates.
“Software Engineer, Identity at Keycard. Skills: Identity, authentication, and authorization systems, Distributed systems, Go or Rust programming, 0→1 environments. Design and build the core identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard. Build infrastructure that lets agents prove trust, enforce policy, and operate autonomously at global scale”
What You'll Achieve.
Deliver a delightful, best-in-class developer experience; Give developers the tools they need to create category-defining applications; Give platform and security teams the security, scalability, visibility, control, and enablement they need; Accelerate organizations' journey to becoming agent native; Deliver auth decisions in under 10ms; Enable truly secure and trusted agentic applications; Advance both developer productivity and security posture
Industry & Context.
Making hard trade-offs; Solving complex distributed systems problems
Hiring focused in North and South America
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
Deep experience building and operating identity, authentication, and authorization systems, Understanding of OAuth, SCIM, OIDC, mTLS, and related primitives, Distributed systems instincts, Fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages, Comfortable moving across the stack from core systems and infrastructure to SDKs and APIs, Ability to make hard trade-offs to ship today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, Ability to use iteration to accelerate the learning loop, Ability to raise the bar for technical excellence, Ability to help those around you grow, Ability to communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, Knowledge of how to jump on a call when needed
Nice to Have
Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them, Experience designing extensible systems — WASM, plugin frameworks, dynamic policy engines, 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, Experience building and shaping developer ecosystems
What You'll Do.
Design and build the core identity
and data systems at the heart of Keycard
Build infrastructure that lets agents prove trust
and operate autonomously at global scale
and fast systems delivering auth decisions in under 10ms across cloud
and hybrid deployments
Work from core distributed services to the SDKs and APIs that developers use
trusted experience end to end
Work directly with founders
and engineers building SDKs and platform services
Shape how Keycard uses agents internally
Contribute to Keycard becoming an agent-native engineering organization
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Work directly with founders, product, design, and engineers building SDKs and platform services; Help those around you grow; Communicate clearly through written plans and async updates; Know when to jump on a call
Communication Scope
Clear communication; Written plans; Async updates
Full Job Description
ABOUT KEYCARD At Keycard http://keycard.ai, 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 https://www.snyk.io, Auth0 https://auth0.com, HashiCorp https://hashicorp.com, and Heroku https://heroku.com. 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. 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 a
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