Staff Engineer

AlphaSense; New York (NY); Remote; CAD 164,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

AlphaSense is expanding its Canadian footprint. We are seeking a true Staff Engineer to own identity, authentication, and authorization platforms at scale, working with security teams to ensure security-by-design in a SOC2 and GDPR environment.

This role spans user provisioning, authentication, and access across a growing customer base, with remote collaboration to Helsinki. You will shape roadmaps, build scalable services, and enable product engineering teams with self-service APIs, while

Qualifications

• Back-end experience with Java 2X and Spring Boot 3.x in scalable systems.
• Experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve the authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC) across teams.
• Design, build, and evolve the authentication platform with diverse use cases, including Auth0 integration.
• Design, build, and evolve the user management platform to create and manage identities and entitlements for the customer base.
• Partner with security teams to ensure SOC2/GDPR compliance by design.
• Create scalable systems to handle growing user bases and customers.
• Define long-term roadmaps for authentication, authorization, and user management; drive self-service APIs (GraphQL, gRPC, REST).
• Lead projects autonomously from Canada while coordinating with Helsinki-based team.
• Promote testing, observability, and reliability across the platform.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

WebFlux

Maven

RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC

OAuth 2.0

OIDC

JWT

SAML 2.0

SSO

Event-driven

Testing

Tools

SQL

GraphQL

gRPC

REST

Job description

The world’s most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research content.

The acquisition of Tegus by AlphaSense in 2024 advances our shared mission to empower professionals to make smarter decisions through AI-driven market intelligence. Together, AlphaSense and Tegus will accelerate growth, innovation, and content expansion, with complementary product and content capabilities that enable users to unearth even more comprehensive insights from thousands of content sets. Our platform is trusted by over 6,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with more than 2,000 employees across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland. Come join us!

About the Team:

The User Management team owns the full identity lifecycle at AlphaSense — from creating and provisioning users, through managing their identities, to authenticating who they are and authorizing what they can do in the system. Our work spans three core domains:

• User Management — creating, provisioning, and managing user identities
• Authentication — verifying who users are
• Authorization — determining what users can do in the system

We are a product platform team, not a product team: we build the identity and access infrastructure that other engineering teams build on top of, rather than shipping user‑facing features ourselves. We also act as a security guardrail for AlphaSense, since identity and access sit at the center of how the platform stays secure.

The team is well-established and senior, based in Helsinki, Finland. We’re now expanding into Canada to build follow‑the‑sun coverage, so our customers get proper support around the clock, and to push deliberately toward a true platform model — scaling our authentication and authorization systems so they can be safely self‑served by teams across the company.

About the Role:

This is a Staff Engineer role on the team that manages identity and access for AlphaSense’s entire, and constantly growing, customer base, and that nearly every product engineering team depends on for user and entitlement data. You’ll work across all three pillars of identity: creating and managing users, authenticating them, and authorizing what they can do — designing systems built to scale with a constantly growing number of users. Security is core to this role, not adjacent to it — you’ll work closely with our security teams to make sure what we build is secure by design, in an environment governed by SOC2 and GDPR.

We’re looking for a genuinely senior, self‑sufficient engineer with strong experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms at scale, ideally in a platform/product‑platform engineering context. This is someone who doesn’t just execute a roadmap, but helps understand the needs behind it, shapes it, and then drives execution — largely autonomously, and in close collaboration with our core team based in Helsinki. You’re genuinely interested in security, comfortable partnering closely with security teams on secure‑by‑design systems, and comfortable working in a distributed, cross‑timezone setup — based in Canada, collaborating closely with a Helsinki‑based team.

Who You Are:

• Backend: Java 2X, Spring Boot 3.X.X, WebFlux, Maven
• Data & APIs: SQL, GraphQL, gRPC, REST
• Identity & Security Protocols: RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC; OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and JWT; SAML 2.0 and enterprise SSO federation (assertion validation, signature/encryption handling, IdP‑vs‑SP‑initiated flows); SCIM for user provisioning and deprovisioning
• Engineering Practices: Event‑driven architecture patterns; TDD or a genuine passion for automated testing

[Nice to Have]

• Auth0 experience
• OpenTelemetry
• Experience operating within SOC2 and/or GDPR‑compliant environments

What You’ll Do:

This role spans all three pillars of our identity platform in equal measure — this is not an authorization‑only or authentication‑only role.

• Design, build, and evolve our authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), enabling teams across the company to answer “what can this user do?”
• Design, build, and evolve our authentication platform, covering authentication patterns across our range of use cases, working closely with our Auth0 integration
• Design, build, and evolve our user management platform — creating, provisioning, and managing user identities and entitlements — supporting our entire customer base
• Partner closely with security teams to ensure our authentication, authorization, and user management platforms are secure by design and aligned with SOC2 and GDPR requirements
• Design and implement highly scalable systems that keep pace with a constantly growing number of users and customers
• Help define the long‑term roadmap across all three domains — authentication, authorization, and user management — not just execute against one handed to you
• Build self‑service systems and APIs (GraphQL, gRPC, REST) that make authentication, authorization, and user data consumable by product engineering teams across the company
• Drive projects autonomously from Canada while staying closely aligned with our Helsinki‑based team
• Champion strong testing, observability, and reliability practices across the platform

For base compensation, we set standard ranges for all roles based on function and level benchmarked against similar stage growth companies and internal comparables. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience/expertise and may vary from the amounts listed below.

You may also be offered equity, and a generous benefits program.

Compensation Range

$164,450 - $226,550 CAD

AlphaSense is an equal‑opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals. All employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling AlphaSense’s commitment to equal employment opportunity. AlphaSense does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any other non‑merit factor. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at AlphaSense, including recruitment, hiring, training, advancement, and termination.

In addition, it is the policy of AlphaSense to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances where a particular employee works.