Staff Engineer

Alphasense; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

AlphaSense seeks a senior Staff Engineer to own and scale our identity platform across authentication, authorization, and user management. You will design secure-by-design systems, collaborate with security and product teams, and drive scalable solutions for a growing customer base.

You will work across RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC, OAuth/OIDC/JWT, and integration with Auth0 and SpiceDB in a distributed North American and Helsinki-based environment.

Qualifications

• Senior backend engineer with identity platform experience.
• Strong design/leadership for authentication, authorization and user management.
• Experience in SOC2/GDPR-compliant environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC).
• Design and evolve authentication platform for diverse use cases.
• Design and evolve user management platform to scale globally.
• Collaborate with security teams to ensure secure-by-design systems.
• Help define long-term roadmap across authentication, authorization, and user management.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

WebFlux

SQL

GraphQL

gRPC

REST

AWS

Kubernetes

RBAC/ABAC

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC

JWT

SAML 2.0

Auth0

SpiceDB

Zanzibar

Apollo Federation

OpenTelemetry

Tools

Auth0

SpiceDB

Zanzibar

Apollo Federation

OpenTelemetry

Job description

About AlphaSense

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 North America — with roles based in both Canada and the US — 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 North America, 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 Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Helm 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 SpiceDB / Zanzibar-style authorization system experience Apollo Federation 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 e Any mention of compliance etc. 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 l