Senior Software Engineer, Authorization Platform

AppFolio Inc; Goleta (CA); On-site; USD 138,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Permissions team to build a scalable authorization platform that governs access across all AppFolio products. You will design fast, reliable permission checks, create interfaces and libraries for other engineers, and lead migrations from older permissions logic while maintaining security and simplicity.

You'll mentor engineers, participate in thoughtful design reviews, and collaborate with product, security, and other teams to ensure changes

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Fluency with AI coding agents - experience with any of the available agents, understanding of common concepts, and willingness to learn and utilize AI for building.
• Depth in Ruby on Rails, Go, or React with TypeScript, or the ability and desire to become effective in them quickly.
• A track record of designing and owning non-trivial Platform systems end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the authorization platform — the roles, policies, and access checks that other teams build on top of
• Improve the speed and reliability of permission checks so they stay fast as usage grows, and set the performance and availability goals that keep them there
• Build the interfaces, libraries, and tooling that other engineering teams use to easily add access control to their own features, so they can move quickly and safely
• Lead the migration of older, hard-to-maintain permissions logic onto the modern authorization platform, reducing risk and complexity along the way
• Raise the technical bar through thoughtful design reviews, pragmatic code review, and clear written proposals that help the team make good decisions together
• Mentor engineers, share context generously, and partner with product, security, and engineering teams to turn ambiguous access-control needs into simple, well-understood systems
• Own quality end-to-end - automated testing, controlled rollouts (with feature flags), and observability - so authorization changes ship safely without disrupting the teams that depend on them

Skills

Full-stack

Performance tuning

Root-cause analysis

Security systems

Communication

Collaboration

Team focus

Ruby on Rails

Go

React TS

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Permissions team to build a scalable authorization platform that governs access across all AppFolio products. You will design fast, reliable permission checks, create interfaces and libraries for other engineers, and lead migrations from older permissions logic while maintaining security and simplicity.

You'll mentor engineers, participate in thoughtful design reviews, and collaborate with product, security, and other teams to ensure changes