Keycard
identity & access infrastructure
StaffDataEngineer
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Staff candidates.
“Staff Data Engineer at Keycard. Skills: Data Engineering, Pipeline Design (Streaming & Batch), Python/Go/Rust, Kafka/Parquet/Iceberg, API Design, Storage Systems Design, Identity & Access Management. design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard. build the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights”
What You'll Achieve.
deliver near real-time enforcement; drive feedback loops; drive customer insights; help organizations understand and improve their security posture; deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system; accelerate the learning loop; raising the bar for technical excellence; shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn’t been built before; gain mastery; hold each other accountable to succeed; shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage; focus on building; accelerate their organizations journey to becoming agent native; help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined design, empowerment to own meaningful problems, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact; advance both developer productivity and security posture
Industry & Context.
make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system; tackling complex distributed systems
hiring focused in North and South America
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms, fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust, experience building with Kafka, Parquet, and Iceberg, think like a builder, not an operator, design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end to end, thrive in 0→1 environments, make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, use iteration to accelerate the learning loop, lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow, communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, know when to jump on a call
Nice to Have
Experience designing and shipping developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or tools that expose data systems in ergonomic and powerful ways, Contributions to open source data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg), experience building libraries used by other developers, Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP), opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly, opinions about the intersection of data, identity, and agents, excitement about shaping that future at Keycard
What You'll Do.
design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard
and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement
and customer insights
integrate external data sources
enable policy evaluation
surface insights in dashboards and APIs
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
work directly with founders, product, and the engineers building our core services and SDKs; help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation; collaborate with the founders and investors; prioritizing asynchronous collaboration
Communication Scope
communicate clearly through written plans and async updates; know when to jump on a call
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 Data Engineer to design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard — the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights. At Keycard, data isn't exhaust — it's core to the product. The systems you build will serve both the transactional needs of our core identity services and the OLAP requirements that help organizations understand and improve their security posture. You'll balance s
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