Backend Engineer, Identity & Auth Systems at Scale

ContentBuffer; 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 seeking an engineer for the Agent Auth and Identity team in San Francisco to design and build authentication, authorization, and identity systems that power both agents and people.

You will own end-to-end architecture, collaborate across product, security, and platform teams, and deliver secure, scalable APIs and SDKs while advancing developer experience and trust in an agentic world.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating backend systems in production at scale.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, or a comparable backend language and willingness to work primarily in TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of authentication and authorization concepts, such as sessions, tokens, OAuth/OIDC flows, permission models, and secrets management.
• A security-minded approach to engineering: threat models, least privilege, and failure modes as part of design.
• A track record of end-to-end ownership, from design and implementation through to long-term operation.
• Ability to reason about architectural tradeoffs, balancing long-term vision with pragmatic delivery.
• Strong cross-team collaboration skills and the ability to drive alignment toward shared goals.
• Curiosity and comfort working in a fast-moving space where the right answers are still being figured out.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the identity, authentication, and authorization systems that power Vercel and our customers for both people and agents.
• Shape how agents prove who they are, act on behalf of users and teams, and receive scoped, time-bound, auditable access.
• Build secure, scalable APIs, services, and SDKs that make auth simple for developers and their agents to adopt.
• Work with modern and emerging standards (OAuth 2.x, OIDC, and agent-focused protocols) and help influence where they go next.
• Lead projects end-to-end: identify opportunities, set technical direction, and deliver improvements in security, reliability, and developer experience.
• Partner closely with product, security, and platform teams across Vercel to make identity a strength of every product we ship.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, taking responsibility for the reliability of critical systems.
• Contribute to open source and the broader community conversation on agent identity and trust.
• Write clean, efficient, tested, and well-documented code that others can build upon confidently.

Skills

JavaScript/TypeScript

Backend development

Authentication/Authorization

Security-minded engineering

End-to-end ownership

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

Vercel is seeking an engineer for the Agent Auth and Identity team in San Francisco to design and build authentication, authorization, and identity systems that power both agents and people.

You will own end-to-end architecture, collaborate across product, security, and platform teams, and deliver secure, scalable APIs and SDKs while advancing developer experience and trust in an agentic world.