Software Engineer, Security

Keycard; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Frontier autonomy

Agent-native culture

Competitive equity

Benefits & vacation

MacBook Pro + $500 stipend

Remote-first

Job summary

Keycard is hiring a staff-level Software Engineer, Security to build and run the security program across product, infrastructure, and publishings. You’ll be the first security-focused engineer, partnering with engineers to close holes early and create tooling for future threats.

Remote-first role with strong autonomy, equity upside, and a focus on protecting token exchanges, delegation, and policy enforcement in a multi-tenant, auditable system.

Qualifications

• Shipped and maintained production code, not only security tooling.
• Can read unfamiliar code, build a reproduce, and ship regression tests.
• Knowledge of OAuth 2.0/OIDC and token exchange (RFC 8693).
• Can spot problems in IAM policy, cloud logs, or network paths.
• Built security tooling that reduces recurring bugs and can explain coverage and gaps.
• Experience with agents and how to limit their access.

Responsibilities

• Threat modeling across token exchange, delegation, and per-tool checks.
• Assume compromise and document residual capabilities.
• Design review of token service, Cedar policy engine, MCP gateway, CLI, SDKs, and Console.
• Attack with scoped agents and chase authorization failures to CI regressions.
• Serve as technical voice during customer security reviews; coordinate with operations.

Skills

Production code

Vulnerability fixes

Code reading

OAuth 2.0/OIDC

IAM policy

Security tooling

Agent-native systems

Job description

About KeycardAt Keycard, we're building identity and access infrastructure for the agent-native era, where software isn't static but a dynamic, constantly changing system of AI agents working on behalf of people and businesses. Keycard gives every agent a verified identity and issues short-lived, task-scoped credentials at runtime, so agents can only do what they were asked to do, and every action is fully auditable. We're backed by a16z, Boldstart, and Acrew, and our founding team built and scaled Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku.

The Role

We're hiring a staff-level Software Engineer, Security. This is a software engineering role: you'll build and run the security program for what Keycard ships and runs, across our product, our infrastructure, and what we publish, mostly as code and automation. Security is everyone's job here. You'd be the first engineer whose whole job is security, working with engineers who already know the field. It matters because security is what we sell: a hole in our token exchange or policy checks hands a customer's agent access nobody granted. You find those holes early and build the tooling that catches the next ones. Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity, credential exchange, delegation, policy, and audit. It has to hold even when the agent itself is compromised. Agents are part of how we build, and part of how you'll do this job. You'll also secure Keycard itself: our cloud accounts, customer-hosted deployments, our pipeline, and secrets. You set the controls and run security response. Platform engineering runs the infrastructure; operations handles audits and customer reviews. You prioritize product and company security work by risk to customers and Keycard.

What You'll Do

• Threat modeling. Trace how an agent gets access, from token exchange through delegation to the per-tool check at our MCP gateway, then attack it: confused deputies, poisoned tool descriptions, prompt injection, issuer and audience mix-ups, token passthrough. Credentials shouldn't leak between hops, and delegated access should end when it expires or is revoked.
• Assume compromise. Even a compromised agent should be stopped from escalating privileges or crossing tenants. Document what it can still do with its access.
• Design review. Review designs and code across the token service, Cedar policy engine, MCP gateway, CLI, SDKs, and Console, mostly for who can do what and whether zones stay isolated.
• Attack with agents. Run scoped agents against an isolated instance and chase the authorization failures they find. Confirmed failures become CI regressions for token exchange, impersonation, or per-tool policy. Example: a harness that follows a delegated credential end to end and checks it never gains scope or lifetime.
• Customer reviews. Be the technical voice when customers' security teams review or pentest us; operations runs the process.

Secure Keycard

• Cloud and delivery controls. Build agents that find and fix misconfigurations in cloud accounts, pipelines, and published artifacts, with scoped access and human review for their changes. With platform engineering, test isolation between deployments and audited break-glass access.
• Our own credentials. Keep them short-lived and narrow. Design service identity and PKI, sign what we ship to customers, and manage dependency risk. You also use Keycard to scope what our own agents can reach.
• Incident response. Investigate vulnerabilities and security events, coordinate fixes, and automate detection and routine fixes where you can. You'll also work out with engineering how on-call works for security.

What We're Looking For

• You’ve shipped and maintained production code, not only security tooling, and you’ve found and fixed vulnerabilities in applications or identity systems.
• You can read unfamiliar code, build an exploit or reproduction, and ship the fix with a regression test.
• You know OAuth 2.0 and 2.1, OIDC, and token exchange (RFC 8693), and can describe failures you've seen, like refresh-token misuse.
• You can spot the problem in an IAM policy, a network path, or a cloud audit log, even if you’ve never run cloud infrastructure.
• You’ve built security tooling other engineers adopted that prevents recurring bugs, and you can explain what it catches, what it misses, and when fixes need human review.
• Agents at work. You use agents for review, triage, or testing, and know how to check their output and limit their access.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience in identity infrastructure, developer tools, or multi-tenant SaaS.
• Experience with DPoP, Cedar, or SPIFFE/SPIRE.
• Hands-on AWS security: IAM, SCPs, logging, infrastructure as code.
• Securing agents or MCP servers, including tool permissions and sandboxing.
• Public security work: CVEs, bug bounties, write-ups, or OAuth and MCP standards work.

Your First 90 Days

• Month one: map trust boundaries in token exchange and one priority delegation flow, attack them, and compare findings with our risk register. Review the company security setup with platform engineering.
• Ship fixes for the findings we agree matter most, each with a CI regression.
• Build reusable evidence for customer reviews and a triage process for pentest findings; questionnaires stay with operations.

Who Will Love This Job

• You’d rather break the product yourself than wait for a customer's red team to.
• You’d rather fix a class of bugs once than file the same finding twice.

What We Offer

• Build at the Frontier: Work every day at the frontier of agent-native systems - shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn't been built before. You'll be given huge autonomy, the opportunity to gain mastery, and the chance to work in a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.
• Truly Agent-Native Culture: At Keycard, we don't just enable others to adopt agents - we use them ourselves to build. You'll help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage.
• Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) give you the security to focus on building - and the asymmetric upside of ownership in a company chasing a category-defining mission.
• Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, plus 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to fully recharge.
• Tools That Keep You Ahead: A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and the best AI tools available so you can work at the forefront of agent-native workflows.
• Remote-First Flexibility: We are a remote-first team prioritizing asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. Work where you're strongest - we just want the best.