Staff Software Engineer (Authentication)

pindropsecurity; EE. UU.; A distancia; USD 180.000 - 240.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

Pindrop is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to shape the cloud-based passport services. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, set standards for cloud-native systems, and drive reliability, security, and scale across AWS and GCP.

You will collaborate with engineering, product, test, and research teams to align roadmaps, mentor engineers, and own incidents from detection to resolution at scale.

Formación

• 8+ years of professional software development experience building backend services and APIs.
• Staff-level impact across multiple services or domains with measurable outcomes.
• Strong hands-on Go or Python experience and solid knowledge of data structures and concurrency.
• Deep experience designing cloud-native systems in AWS or GCP including S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, IAM.
• Proven ownership of highly available systems, including deployment, monitoring, incident response, and CI/CD with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience defining or influencing technical standards, architecture, or roadmaps.
• Strong written and verbal communication to align stakeholders.

Responsabilidades

• Define and evolve the technical strategy and architectural direction for Passport's cloud services, spanning multiple subsystems and workflows.
• Lead high-impact, ambiguous initiatives from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational follow-through, using Go and Python.
• Set technical standards and reusable patterns for cloud-native services across AWS and GCP, including services such as Kinesis, DynamoDB, and S3, with a focus on reliability, scale, and secure production operation.
• Make and communicate consequential tradeoffs involving reliability, scalability, latency, security, cost, and time to market.
• Anticipate systemic risks, identify architectural gaps, and drive mitigation before they affect customers, delivery velocity, or operational stability.
• Partner with software engineering, test engineering, research, product teams to align roadmaps and deliver new capabilities.
• Lead technical reviews and facilitate alignment on complex design decisions, migration strategies, and ownership boundaries.
• Participate in incident response for critical systems, translating operational learnings into durable improvements in alerting, runbooks, deployment quality, and service ownership.
• Raise the effectiveness of engineers through mentorship, code reviews, and hands-on collaboration.
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation and help cover after-hours alerts as needed.

Conocimientos

Go

Python

Cloud-native design

AWS / GCP

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

Staff-level leadership

Herramientas

CI/CD tooling

Descripción del empleo

Who We Are Pindrop is a cybersecurity company delivering continuous identity verification across voice, video, and digital interactions. Powered by the Pindrop Intelligence Network, our unified trust platform helps enterprises answer three critical questions: Is this identity synthetic? Detect AI-generated and manipulated voice and video. Is this identity risky? Identify fraud, suspicious behavior, and other risk signals. Is this identity known? Authenticate identities using voice, device, behavioral, and other signals. Pindrop brings this intelligence together across purpose-built trust engines to help organizations make informed decisions in real time — protecting customers, workforce interactions, and emerging AI-driven interactions. Pindrop protects billions of high-risk interactions for enterprises, including leading financial institutions, insurers, and healthcare organizations. Its technology is informed by more than 8 billion real-world interactions annually and protected by 300+ patents. Recognized by TIME as one of the 10 Most Influential Software Companies of 2026 and by Inc. for Best in Business for Innovation, Pindrop is backed by leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, and CapitalG.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Authentication team, you will set technical direction for the cloud services and infrastructure behind Passport, guiding the team through its continued migration to the cloud platform. You will operate beyond a single service or sprint, leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and security posture of Authentication's systems. This is an individual contributor role with broad technical influence and no direct people-management responsibility. You will partner closely with engineering leaders, product, test and research to shape architecture, resolve systemic risks, and turn ambiguous problems into durable solutions.

More specifically, you will:

• Define and evolve the technical strategy and architectural direction for Passport's cloud services, spanning multiple subsystems and workflows.
• Lead high-impact, ambiguous initiatives from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and operational follow-through, using Go and Python.
• Set technical standards and reusable patterns for cloud-native services across AWS and GCP, including services such as Kinesis, DynamoDB, and S3, with a focus on reliability, scale, and secure production operation.
• Make and communicate consequential tradeoffs involving reliability, scalability, latency, security, cost, and time to market.
• Anticipate systemic risks, identify architectural gaps, and drive mitigation before they affect customers, delivery velocity, or operational stability.
• Partner closely with software engineering, test engineering, research, product teams to align roadmaps and deliver new capabilities.
• Lead technical reviews and facilitate alignment on complex design decisions, migration strategies, and ownership boundaries.
• Participate in incident response for critical systems, translating operational learnings into durable improvements in alerting, runbooks, deployment quality, and service ownership, using modern observability tooling to reduce ticket volume.
• Raise the effectiveness of engineers across the team through mentorship, code reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration.
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation, including helping cover after-hours alerts as the team expands distributed support coverage.

Who you are

You are a systems thinker who can connect architectural decisions to customer impact, business priorities, and long-term engineering health.

You are an owner who can independently drive work from design through production with strong judgment around performance, scale, and security.

You are widely trusted to lead complex technical discussions, create alignment, and influence decisions without relying on formal authority.

You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, making progress with incomplete information, and adapting technical direction as new evidence emerges.

You communicate complex system behavior, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions clearly to engineers, product, and cross-functional partners.

You remain calm and accountable during incidents, architectural challenges, and shifting priorities.

You are invested in helping others grow and bring a mentorship mindset to code reviews, collaboration, and team development.

You are motivated by authentication, identity, and security-sensitive backend engineering at scale.

Your skill-set

Must-haves

• 8+ years of professional software development experience building backend services and APIs, or equivalent practical depth.
• Demonstrated Staff-level impact: leading significant technical initiatives across multiple services or domains and delivering measurable outcomes.
• Strong hands-on experience with Go, Python, or similar languages, plus a deep foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and Linux-based development.
• Deep experience designing and operating cloud-native systems in AWS or GCP, including managed services such as S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and IAM.
• Proven ownership of highly available systems, including deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, and operational improvement, using CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience defining or influencing technical standards, architecture, or roadmaps across team boundaries.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document decisions and build alignment among stakeholders with different priorities.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with backend data stores and messaging technologies such as Redis, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch.
• Experience in authentication, identity, fraud prevention, or other security-sensitive product environments.
• Strong observability practices across metrics, logs, and traces, with a track record of using them to drive production diagnos