Staff Engineer, AI Services: Control Plane & Identity

Sycamore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. We are a small, engineering-led team collaborating with Fortune 500 enterprises to design and deploy agentic apps with strong security and centralized control.

You will work on the agent-facing control plane, registry, identity, and the model gateway, shaping where and how agents operate within customer environments. This role emphasizes ensuring correctness, security, and scalable architecture.

Qualifications

• 5-12 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience building integration or API platforms where third-party systems, credentials, and partial failure are daily material.
• Strong backend and distributed-systems fundamentals, including typed API design, asynchronous services, persistence, reliability, and production debugging.
• A security-minded approach to identity, authorization, delegation, credentials, multi-tenancy, and auditability.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control-plane services that register agents, issue and verify their identity, and decide what they are permitted to do.
• Own the integration surface: connectors, tool execution, protocol gateways, consent flows, and the read and write policy on each.
• Design authorization, delegation, and credential flows so that agents can act without ever holding a customer secret they could leak.
• Build and operate the model gateway: routing, provider fallback, timeouts and cancellation, rate limiting, budgets, and cost attribution.
• Publish reliable, versioned APIs and contracts that Core AI, Product, and customer applications depend on.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

API platforms

Identity and authorization

Security minded

Cost accounting

Tools

Python

Go

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. We are a small, engineering-led team collaborating with Fortune 500 enterprises to design and deploy agentic apps with strong security and centralized control.

You will work on the agent-facing control plane, registry, identity, and the model gateway, shaping where and how agents operate within customer environments. This role emphasizes ensuring correctness, security, and scalable architecture.