Senior Identity & Access Engineer: Secure, Scalable Auth

Baseten; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in Baseten

Medical, dental, vision for employee &

Flexible PTO including Winter Break

Parental leave

Fertility stipend

401(k)

Learning opportunities via ML startups

Job summary

Baseten, the platform that powers AI at scale, is building the identity and authorization layer for enterprise engineering. This founding role owns the authorization model, credentials, and admin experiences used by organizations like Harvey, HubSpot, and Notion.

You’ll design a fine-grained, low-latency authorization system from the ground up, ensuring consistent behavior across the product and strong security guarantees for mission-critical workloads.

Qualifications

• 4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems, including hands-on design and implementation of a product authorization system: per-resource or per-object permissions, relationship-based access control, a policy engine, or a fine-grained authorization system in the style of Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar.
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: you've taken a system from first design through implementation, production rollout, and iteration with users.
• Experience developing and operating multi-tenant systems at scale, where authorization checks sit in the request path and latency and consistency matter.
• Comfort working across the full stack, from product and application code to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Design authorization and credential models that support critical user workflows today and can be safely extended as the platform evolves.
• Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise security requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Establish engineering practices for quality, security, observability, and operational ownership.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship as the team grows.

Skills

Backend systems

Authorization systems

Policy engines

Scalability

Tools

Python

Go

OpenFGA

SpiceDB

Cedar

Kubernetes

Job description

Baseten, the platform that powers AI at scale, is building the identity and authorization layer for enterprise engineering. This founding role owns the authorization model, credentials, and admin experiences used by organizations like Harvey, HubSpot, and Notion.

You’ll design a fine-grained, low-latency authorization system from the ground up, ensuring consistent behavior across the product and strong security guarantees for mission-critical workloads.