Staff Software Engineer - Identity & Access Management

Brex; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Brex in New York is seeking a Staff Engineer for Identity and Access Management. You will lead projects to improve security, reliability, and developer experience across authentication, authorization, and identity platforms for customers, partners, and internal systems.

This role blends technical leadership with hands-on delivery, guiding cross-functional teams, shaping architecture, and promoting secure-by-default patterns. The role is based in New York in a hybrid setup with in-office days.

Qualifications

• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable production backend systems.
• You have experience leading complex projects and mentoring other engineers.
• You have strong API design fundamentals, rigor around testing, code quality, and documentation.
• You understand core IAM concepts such as authentication, authorization, sessions, tokens, MFA, SSO, OAuth, SAML, OIDC, or RBAC.
• You communicate clearly, collaborate well across teams, and are effective in cross‑functional technical discussions.
• You care about operational excellence and know how to improve system reliability, reduce toil, and maintain high‑quality services over time.
• You have strong product and engineering judgment and can balance security, usability, and developer experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and APIs for authentication, authorization, identity context, and audit-related workflows.
• Lead engineers across the organization on initiatives end to end, from technical design and implementation through rollout, measurement, and operational support.
• Improve login and access experiences across SSO, MFA, step-up authentication, delegated access, and enterprise identity flows.
• Build and extend authorization systems that support custom roles, resource‑aware access control, and secure defaults for product teams.
• Lead creation of durable, identity‑aware audit trails and attribution for user, service, delegated, and agent‑driven actions.
• Partner closely with engineers across Brex to make IAM integrations secure by default and easier to adopt through clear patterns, tooling, and shared libraries.
• Mentor engineers on the team to deliver high-quality code and produce operational improvements that raise the bar for reliability and maintainability across the team’s systems.

Skills

Backend systems

API design

IAM concepts

Project leadership

Mentoring engineers

Reliability engineering

Tools

Okta

OAuth

OIDC

SAML

WebAuthn

Job description

Why join us

Brex is the intelligent finance platform that enables companies to spend smarter and move faster in more than 200 markets. By combining global corporate cards and banking with intuitive spend management, bill pay, and travel software, Brex enables founders and finance teams to accelerate operations, gain real-time visibility, and control spend effortlessly. Brex’s AI-native automation and world-class service eliminate manual expense and accounting tasks for customers so they can focus on what matters most. Tens of thousands of the world's best companies run on Brex, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood, Zoom, Plaid, Reddit, and SeatGeek.

Working at Brex allows you to push your limits, challenge the status quo, and collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the industry. We’re committed to building a diverse team and inclusive culture and believe your potential should only be limited by how big you can dream. We make this a reality by empowering you with the tools, resources, and support you need to grow your career.

Engineering at Brex

Engineering at Brex is about building systems that scale with speed and intention. Our teams operate with high autonomy and deep collaboration, own outcomes end to end, and push for excellence from architecture to deployment. It’s an environment where engineering is a craft and builders grow by solving meaningful technical problems.

What you’ll do

The Identity and Access Management team builds and maintains secure, user-friendly authentication and authorization systems that protect users, safeguard company assets, and provide a seamless access experience for developers. The team owns critical platform capabilities including login methods, step-up authentication, our custom authorization platform, account delegation flows like Copilot, Pro Access login, embedded partnerships authentication, and core vendor integrations.

As a Staff Engineer on IAM, you will lead projects and initiatives to improve the security, reliability, and developer experience of our authentication, authorization, and identity platforms for customers, partners, and internal systems. You will scope and drive projects with clear impact, work cross-functionally with the broader engineering organization, help define the team’s technical quality, and help evolve the identity platform as Brex invests in signed identity propagation, delegated and agent identity, fine-grained authorization, stronger auditability, and enterprise‑ready customer authentication experiences.

Where you’ll work

This role will be based in our New York office. We are a hybrid environment that combines the energy and connections of being in the office with the benefits and flexibility of working from home. We currently require Monday, Wednesday and Thursday to be designated in office days. As a perk, we also have up to four weeks per year of fully remote work!

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and APIs for authentication, authorization, identity context, and audit-related workflows.
• Lead engineers across the organization on initiatives end to end, from technical design and implementation through rollout, measurement, and operational support.
• Improve login and access experiences across SSO, MFA, step-up authentication, delegated access, and enterprise identity flows.
• Build and extend authorization systems that support custom roles, resource‑aware access control, and secure defaults for product teams.
• Lead creation of durable, identity‑aware audit trails and attribution for user, service, delegated, and agent‑driven actions.
• Partner closely with engineers across Brex to make IAM integrations secure by default and easier to adopt through clear patterns, tooling, and shared libraries.
• Mentor engineers on the team to deliver high-quality code and produce operational improvements that raise the bar for reliability and maintainability across the team’s systems.

Requirements

• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable production backend systems.
• You have experience leading complex projects and mentoring other engineers.
• You have strong API design fundamentals, rigor around testing, code quality, and documentation.
• You understand core IAM concepts such as authentication, authorization, sessions, tokens, MFA, SSO, OAuth, SAML, OIDC, or RBAC.
• You communicate clearly, collaborate well across teams, and are effective in cross‑functional technical discussions.
• You care about operational excellence and know how to improve system reliability, reduce toil, and maintain high‑quality services over time.
• You have strong product and engineering judgment and can balance security, usability, and developer experience.

Bonus points

• You have worked on identity and access management, authentication, authorization, or audit systems in a production environment.
• You have hands‑on experience with Okta, Oso, SSO, SAML, OIDC, OAuth, or WebAuthn.
• You have experience building enterprise‑facing admin controls, authorization platforms, delegated access flows, or audit trails.
• You have worked on platform teams that provide shared infrastructure, paved roads, or secure‑by‑default frameworks for other engineering teams.

Compensation:

The expected salary range for this role is $240,000 - $300,000. However, the starting base pay will depend on a number of factors, including the candidate’s location, skills, experience, market demands, and internal pay parity. Depending on the position offered, equity and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package.

Brex LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Capital One, N.A.

Please be aware, job‑seekers may be at risk of targeting by malicious actors looking for personal data. Brex recruiters will only reach out via LinkedIn or email with a brex.com domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Brex via other sources should be ignored.