Senior Backend Engineer — Identity & Scale Platform

Vanta; United States; Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 263,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Medical/dental/vision coverage

16 weeks parental leave

Remote workspace stipend

401(k) matching

Flexible PTO and Sick Time

Job summary

Vanta is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team to define identity primitives, enforce permissions, and build auditable agent-based actions at scale. You will mentor engineers, drive complex projects, and collaborate with Security to uphold best practices for customer data.

You will contribute to a scalable backend stack across surfaces like MCP, CLI, and Vanta Agent, shaping the technical direction as the company grows.

Qualifications

• Industry experience with backend software development.
• Strong knowledge of authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML) and identity federation concepts (SSO), or authorization frameworks (RBAC, policy-based access control).
• Experience building platform services that scale across multiple teams.
• Strong data modeling skills for systems with complex relationships.
• Experience solving distributed systems challenges around performance and security.
• Success with complex technical migrations that maintain system stability.
• Security-focused mindset and understanding of enterprise security practices.
• Have led technical projects spanning months.
• Work well in environments that value decisive action and getting things done.
• Experience mentoring and collaborating with other engineers.
• Interest in contributing to Vanta's engineering culture as we grow.
• Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex projects with multiple stakeholders and engineers to enable our business and team to scale.
• Collaborate with Security to ensure Vanta's platform implements best practices for customer data.
• Support design reviews, communicate constraints, and help engineers make the right trade-offs.
• Act as a cultural beacon, setting an example for effective, collaborative engineering and helping mentor junior team members.
• Make effective tradeoffs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation.
• Drive initiatives to increase operational posture and execution quality across the engineering organization.

Skills

Backend software development

Authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML)

Identity federation / SSO

RBAC / access control

Data modeling

Distributed systems

Technical migrations

Security mindset

Project leadership

Mentoring engineers

AI in software engineering

Job description

Vanta is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team to define identity primitives, enforce permissions, and build auditable agent-based actions at scale. You will mentor engineers, drive complex projects, and collaborate with Security to uphold best practices for customer data.

You will contribute to a scalable backend stack across surfaces like MCP, CLI, and Vanta Agent, shaping the technical direction as the company grows.