Staff Identity Engineer

Keycard Labs; Canada; Remote; CAD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge technology firm is seeking a Staff Identity Engineer to create innovative identity and access systems for autonomous agents. You will design secure workflows and collaborate with teams to redefine user experiences. The ideal candidate has expertise in identity systems and strong programming skills in languages like Go or Rust. Join us in a remote-first environment to shape the future of trusted, agent-native applications.

Benefits

Market-competitive salaries

Generous equity packages

Comprehensive benefits including health and dental

Flexible remote-first work environment

Tools for productivity

Qualifications

• Deep experience with identity, authentication, and authorization systems.
• Ability to design reliable, secure, multi-tenant systems.
• Experience in coding and building distributed services.

Responsibilities

• Build identity and access control systems for Keycard.
• Design and implement secure authentication and authorization protocols.
• Collaborate across product and engineering to shape systems.

Skills

Identity & Authorization Systems Expertise

Design for Security & Trust

Hands-On Builder at Heart

Iterative Delivery in 0→1

Empathetic Leader & Collaborator

Remote Collaboration Mastery

Tools

Go

Rust

Job description

About Keycard

Keycard is building identity & access infrastructure for the agent-native era — where software is a dynamic, evolving 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 secure, scalable foundations to build, deploy, adopt, and trust agentic applications. We’re building the real-time, in-band, contextual guardrails required to transition from human-driven to autonomous and agentic workflows that give users, builders, and security teams the confidence and control to bring agents out of the lab and into production.

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 needed to accelerate the 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.

The Role

We’re hiring a Staff Identity Engineer to help invent the next generation of identity and access control infrastructure — unlocking the true potential of trusted, autonomous agents and enabling businesses, consumers, and developers to transition from static, human-driven point-and-click experiences to asynchronous, agent-driven, human-controlled workflows.

Your mission is to build the identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard. These are dynamic, asynchronous, reliable, and trusted services designed for global scale, capable of authentication and authorization decisions in under 10ms. Your work will empower users to adopt agents they can trust and enable developers to build best-in-class agentic experiences that are secure-by-design.

You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with founders, product, design, engineering, and customers, shaping the product together. You’ll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help create the foundation for the next generation of software.

This is a unique opportunity to:

• Invent Agent-Native Identity: Design and build the core authentication, authorization, and data systems that underpin Keycard, redefining how machines and agents prove trust in the AI era, integrated deeply into MCP, A2A, and leading agentic frameworks.

• Build Dynamic, Trusted Systems: Deliver distributed, asynchronous services with strong security guarantees that perform authentication and authorization enforcement in under 10ms — enabling developers to put agents into production with confidence.

• Work Across the Product Surface: Contribute from SDKs and developer-facing APIs to the core identity and data systems that power them, ensuring a seamless, trusted developer-first experience end to end.

• Become Agent-Native: Use agents every day to build Keycard, and help shape the future of agentic coding. Contribute to how the team adopts, experiments with, and refines agent workflows — pushing Keycard to become a best-in-class agentic engineering organization.

• Empower Developers & Security Teams: Create the core technology that enables developers, users, and security teams to collaborate on trusted, autonomous agents, unlocking the real potential of the agentic future.

What We’re Looking For

• Identity & Authorization Systems Expertise: Deep experience building and operating core identity, authentication, and authorization systems. You understand and can implement protocols like OAuth, OIDC, TLS, and related primitives — and you treat them as products that empower developers to build secure experiences with strong, reliable identity primitives.

• Design for Security & Trust: Proven ability to design distributed systems that are reliable, secure, multi-tenant, and built on simple and extensible data models with strong guarantees around consensus and transactionality. You balance flexibility with determinism to deliver dependable systems.

• Hands-On Builder at Heart: A programmer first, you thrive on writing code, designing APIs, and building distributed services. You’re fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages and have built systems that developers rely on daily. You’re excited to move across the stack, solving problems from SDKs and APIs to core systems and infrastructure.

• Iterative Delivery in 0→1: You thrive in ambiguous early-stage environments, using iteration to accelerate learning. You make hard trade-offs to deliver quickly today while ensuring long-term system quality.

• Empathetic Leader & Collaborator: You combine empathy for developers, teammates, and customers with a craftsman’s mindset. You lead by example—raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you succeed.

• Remote Collaboration Mastery: Experience in distributed teams; you communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and you know when to align quickly over a call or doc.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Agent-Native Builder: Actively experimenting with agents in your own workflows and forming strong opinions on how organizations can adopt coding agents. You go beyond using agents to build your own and understand the next generation of software.

• Extensible, Plugin-Driven Systems: Experience designing systems to be extended — with WASM, plugin frameworks, or dynamic policy engines — so teams can tailor platforms to their needs.

• API & Library Craft: A passion for designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics that make it easy for developers to adopt and trust complex systems quickly.

• Open Source Credibility: Contributions to CNCF, identity, or security projects, or experience shaping developer ecosystems.

• Vision for the Future: Opinions about where identity, agents, and the future of work are headed — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard.

What We Offer

• Build at the Frontier: Work at the frontier of agent-native systems—shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn’t been built before. You’ll have autonomy, opportunities to master new skills, and a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.

• Truly Agent-Native Culture: We use agents ourselves to build and empower you to shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as a competitive advantage.

• Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages with long-term upside.

• Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to recharge.

• Tools That Keep You Ahead: A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and access to the best AI tools for agent-native workflows.

• Remote-First Flexibility: Remote-first with asynchronous collaboration; hiring focused in North and South America. Work where you’re strongest.

Why Join Us?

Keycard is building the fundamental unlock for the next generation of software: secure and trusted agentic applications. We’re building a new identity and access control stack to move from static, user-focused, long-lived roles to dynamic, contextually-scoped, short-lived agent-human interactions.

As an early employee, you’ll help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined design, and high-quality delivery with real impact. You’ll collaborate with founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Auth0, and Heroku.

If you’re energized by tackling complex distributed systems and want to advance both developer productivity and security posture, with a hunger to learn, have impact, and move quickly with determination, we’d love to explore how you can shape the future of software at Keycard.