Software Engineer - Identity and Authorization

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Flexible PTO

Parental leave

401(k)

Learning opportunities

Job summary

Baseten in San Francisco is seeking a founder‑level engineer to own the identity and authorization layer of the platform. You will design and implement the authorization model, credential systems, and admin experiences that enterprise IT teams use to govern access for organizations.

This role focuses on low‑latency checks, policy engines, multi‑tenant design, and secure, scalable collaboration with product, design, and customer teams.

Qualifications

• Experience building production backend authorization systems with per-resource or per-object permissions, policy engines, or similar.
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership from design to production rollout and iteration.
• Experience operating multi-tenant systems where latency and consistency matter.
• Comfort working across the full stack, including cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition through implementation and iteration.
• Design authorization and credential models to support current workflows and future growth.
• Collaborate with product, design, and customer teams to translate security requirements into durable solutions.
• Establish engineering practices for quality, security, observability, and ownership.
• Provide technical leadership as the team grows.

Skills

Fine-grained authorization

Back-end systems

Latency & scalability

Cross-functional collaboration

Security best practices

Tools

OpenFGA

SpiceDB

Cedar

Python

Go

OAuth

OIDC

SCIM

Kubernetes

Job description

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

The largest, most demanding enterprises run on Baseten, and they bring exacting requirements for how people, services, and agents access the platform. This is the founding role for our identity and authorization team within enterprise engineering. You'll own the identity and access layer of the Baseten platform: the authorization model, credential systems, and admin experiences that enterprise IT teams use to govern access for organizations like Harvey, HubSpot, and Notion.

You'll design and build Baseten's fine-grained authorization system from the ground up to support the workflows customers depend on today while giving them cleaner, more precise ways to manage access as the platform grows. Authorization at Baseten requires low-latency permission checks at high request volume, consistent contracts and behaviors across the product suite, and strong security guarantees for mission-critical, highly regulated workloads.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

Recent and upcoming work in this area:

• Fine-grained authorization for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads: per-resource permissions at the organization, team, and workload scope to support both common workflows and complex enterprise access policies
• Programmatic authentication allowing high-compliance customers to connect service principles securely via short-lived, workload-based credentials
• Agent credentials that grant an agent exactly the access it needs for the given task and nothing more
• Enterprise identity lifecycle including single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and per-organization session expiry policies
• Admin controls for centralized visibility, auditability, and governance over credentials, roles, and access

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.

REQUIREMENTS

• 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.

Preferred:

• Experience with Python and Go.
• Experience running an OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or similar deployment in production, beyond a proof of concept.
• Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM at the protocol level.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).