Senior Backend Architect: IAM, Policy & Workflows (SF)

Thomas Talent Network, LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meals in office

Health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Our client in San Francisco is hiring a founding backend engineer to own end-to-end system design for an AI coworker platform. You will build a durable workflow engine, secure identity models, and policy-driven authorization across human, service, and agent interactions.

You will also implement isolated environments for agents, plus scalable APIs to manage, audit, and operate production systems with strong emphasis on security and reliability.

Qualifications

• Designed and operated complex production systems with clear incident history.
• Backend and systems architecture expertise, with cross-domain collaboration.
• Depth in IAM/authorization, policy systems, workflow orchestration, or multi-tenant SaaS.
• Thinks in invariants, threat models, failure modes, and user outcomes.
• Able to work through ambiguity without sacrificing security or operability.
• Willingness to work in person in SF, Monday to Friday, startup tempo.

Responsibilities

• Own the workflow engine for long-running human and agent work: durable state, retries, idempotency, approvals, replay, compensation, auditability.
• Design identity and authorization for humans, services, and agents: principals, delegation, scoped sessions, tenant isolation, traceable authority.
• Build a versioned policy engine: who/what can do which action on which resource, under what context.
• Secure storage and use of customer keys, OAuth tokens, and admin credentials: isolation, rotation, episodic injection, revocation, blast-radius containment.
• Define the boundary between probabilistic model behavior and deterministic execution: validation, evals, release gates.
• Create isolated virtual environments and dev boxes for agents: reproducible state, observability, resource controls, safe teardown.
• Provide interfaces and APIs to author, approve, inspect, debug, and operate these systems in production.

Job description

Our client in San Francisco is hiring a founding backend engineer to own end-to-end system design for an AI coworker platform. You will build a durable workflow engine, secure identity models, and policy-driven authorization across human, service, and agent interactions.

You will also implement isolated environments for agents, plus scalable APIs to manage, audit, and operate production systems with strong emphasis on security and reliability.