Backend Engineer - Identity & Auth, Equity + Flexible PTO

Vercel Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 196,000 - 294,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Healthcare

Mentorship & events

Flexible time off

WFH budget

Job summary

Vercel is hiring an engineer for the Agent Auth and Identity team to design and operate identity, authentication, and authorization systems for agents and people. You will work on scalable APIs, OAuth/OIDC flows, and secure, auditable access across Vercel products.

You will own end-to-end projects from design to production, collaborate widely across product and security teams, and contribute to open source efforts around agent identity and trust.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of backend design, build, and production operations experience.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript or a backend language; willingness to work in TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of authentication and authorization concepts (sessions, tokens, OAuth/OIDC).
• Security-minded approach, considering threat models and least privilege.
• End-to-end ownership from design through long-term production operation.
• Ability to reason about architectural tradeoffs and pragmatic delivery.
• Strong cross-team collaboration and alignment toward goals.
• Curiosity and comfort in fast-moving, evolving spaces.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate identity, authentication, and authorization systems for people and agents.
• Shape how agents prove who they are and receive scoped, time-bound access.
• Develop secure, scalable APIs and SDKs for developers and agents.
• Work with OAuth 2.x, OIDC, and agent-focused protocols and influence direction.
• Lead end-to-end projects, from opportunities to production improvements.
• Collaborate with product, security, and platform teams to strengthen identity across products.
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure reliability of critical systems.
• Contribute to open source and broader agent identity conversations.
• Write clean, tested, well-documented code for long-term reuse.

Skills

Backend systems

TypeScript

JavaScript

Authentication & Authorization

Security-minded engineering

End-to-end ownership

Architectural tradeoffs

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

Vercel is hiring an engineer for the Agent Auth and Identity team to design and operate identity, authentication, and authorization systems for agents and people. You will work on scalable APIs, OAuth/OIDC flows, and secure, auditable access across Vercel products.

You will own end-to-end projects from design to production, collaborate widely across product and security teams, and contribute to open source efforts around agent identity and trust.