Staff+ Software Engineer, Auth & Identity

United States Digital Space LLC; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 405,000 - 485,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking an experienced backend/platform engineer focused on authentication, authorization, and identity services. You will own high-traffic systems end to end, shaping how identity and access work across our products.

The role emphasizes reliability, security, and scalable architectures for enterprise customers. We value candidates with OAuth 2.0/OIDC, SAML, JWTs, and policy engines, with preferred experience in Go, Python, Rust, or TypeScript.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and operating backend or platform systems at scale.
• Experience with identity, authentication, authorization, or security-adjacent infrastructure.
• Familiar with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, JWTs, policy engines such as Cedar or OPA, and RBAC.

Responsibilities

• Own critical, high-traffic systems end to end, from design through rollout, operations, and iteration.
• Shape the technical strategy for identity and access across the company.
• Design credentials for agents and long-running autonomous workloads.
• Route all access decisions through a unified authorization system with low latency and multi-region resilience.
• Build a first-class identity model for service accounts and agents, linked to other identity systems.
• Enable global distribution and multi-region failover for mission-critical services.
• Deepen enterprise integration: login policies, recovery methods, self-service allowlisting.
• Collaborate with product, security, infrastructure, and product teams to set technical direction.

Skills

Backend systems

Identity/auth

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC

SAML / SCIM

JWTs / token exchange

Policy engines (CEDAR / OPA)

RBAC / access control

Go / Python / Rust / TypeScript

Enterprise identity integrations

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent (relevant field)

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

The Auth & Identity team builds the authentication, authorization, and identity platform that underpins every the company product: the API, Claude Code, Claude.ai, and our Enterprise offerings. Every login, API key, OAuth token, access decision, and organization record flows through the systems we own. As Claude moves from a chat product to an agentic platform, we are defining what identity and access look like when the actor is a human, a service account, or an autonomous agent acting on someone's behalf.

We are a platform team with a product surface. The horizontal is the set of services every product consumes: credential minting and exchange, authorization controls, and the canonical record of users, service accounts, agents, and the organizations they belong to. The vertical is the experience where admins author that policy: SSO and SCIM setup, roles and permissions, IP allowlisting, and API key policies.

Our work falls into four pillars:

• Authentication - Who you are. Credential minting, exchange, and lifecycle; sessions; workload identity federation; auth for async and agentic workloads.

• Authorization - What you can do. The policy framework for model, membership, role, and resource access.

• Identity - Who belongs to what. The tenant and organization model, and first-class identity for humans, service accounts, and agents, portable across surfaces and cloud environments.

• Enterprise - How enterprises connect. SSO, SCIM, login policies, and the admin controls that let customers provision and govern users from their own identity provider.

What you'll do

You will own critical, high-traffic systems end to end, from design through rollout, operations, and iteration, and help shape the technical strategy for how identity and access work across the company. Representative problems we are working on right now:

• Designing credentials for agents and long-running autonomous workloads.

• Routing every access decision through a unified authorization system, with low latency, security guarantees, and multi-region resilience.

• Building a first-class identity model for service accounts and agents, and linking those identities to other identity and auth systems.

• Global distribution and multi-region failover for some of the company’s most mission-critical services.

• Deepening enterprise integration: login policies and recovery methods, self-service allowlisting, and tighter integrations with providers.

You will work closely with product, security, infrastructure, and the product teams that consume our primitives, and you will be expected to set technical direction, not just execute on it. Many of the problems are 0-to-1 with no established pattern to copy; others are careful migrations of systems that every the company customer depends on in the hot path.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience building and operating backend or platform systems at scale, ideally including identity, authentication, authorization, or security-adjacent infrastructure.

• Have worked with some of: OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, SAML, SCIM, JWTs and token exchange, workload identity federation, policy engines such as Cedar or OPA, or RBAC and resource-level access control models.

• Care deeply about reliability and security. You design for on-call, failure modes, revocation, and the engineer who inherits your system, and you treat availability of auth as table stakes for every product built on it.

• Are comfortable owning large migrations in live, high-traffic systems: shadow modes, incremental rollouts, and clean retirement of legacy paths.

• Take a product-focused approach to platform work and build primitives that are easy for other engineers to adopt correctly, with documentation and self-service as part of the deliverable.

• Can navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions independently, and communicate clearly with cross-functional partners and stakeholders.

• Are familiar with using AI tools as part of your software development workflow.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with globally distributed databases and multi-region service architecture.

• Experience working in Go, Python, Rust, or TypeScript across a rapidly changing codebase.

• Prior work on enterprise identity integrations with major identity providers and cloud IAM systems.

Preference will be given to candidates based in NY, SEA, SF or the Bay Area given the current location of team.

Annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary:

$405,000-$485,000 USD

LogisticsMinimum education:

Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:

A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience:

Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy:

Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:

We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.