Principal Engineer, Enterprise Authorization (Remote)

Nike; Beaverton (OR); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 314,000; Full time

Job summary

Nike is seeking a Principal Engineer to define the future of authorization across its global technology ecosystem. You will lead the transformation to a centralized, policy-driven authorization platform and collaborate with security, architecture, and product teams to embed governance into the SDLC.

The role requires deep expertise in IAM, distributed systems, and policy-as-code, with hands-on coding in backend or platform languages and multi-region production deployments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in computer science, software engineering, information security, or related field.
• 8+ years of experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale software platforms and distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in authorization architectures, identity and access management, authentication, identity governance, and privileged access concepts.
• Experience designing centralized policy decision services, policy enforcement architectures, and policy-as-code solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy, mentor engineers, and drive architectural transformation across multiple organizations.
• Hands-on software engineer who actively writes and maintains production code and deploys distributed systems into live, high-availability, multi-region production environments.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the enterprise authorization architecture, establishing standards, patterns, and engineering practices across applications, APIs, cloud platforms, and business services.
• Lead the transition from application-specific roles, permissions, and user exceptions to centralized policy decision services and reusable authorization capabilities.
• Design and implement policy-based authorization solutions that express requirements as code, test automatically, and deploy via modern engineering workflows.
• Partner with Security, Enterprise Architecture, Platform Engineering, and Product Engineering to embed authorization and identity controls into the software development lifecycle.
• Influence the future of Identity as Policy by developing shared services, frameworks, and platforms supporting workforce, consumer, partner, and machine identities.
• Mentor engineers, guide architectural decisions, and help teams adopt scalable authorization and identity capabilities.

Skills

Authorization architectures

Identity & access management

Policy as code

Distributed systems

Mentor engineers

Production code

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Security

Job description

Nike is seeking a Principal Engineer to define the future of authorization across its global technology ecosystem. You will lead the transformation to a centralized, policy-driven authorization platform and collaborate with security, architecture, and product teams to embed governance into the SDLC.

The role requires deep expertise in IAM, distributed systems, and policy-as-code, with hands-on coding in backend or platform languages and multi-region production deployments.