Engineering Manager, Authentication Platform

1Kosmos•Edison, NJ

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

1Kosmos is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead technical execution for its Authentication Platform, which provides passwordless, phishing-resistant authentication, SSO, and access services used in the login path by millions of users. This hands-on technical leadership role involves setting architectural direction, making design decisions, removing delivery blockers, maintaining release quality, and contributing to the codebase when needed. The manager will guide a distributed team of 4–6 engineers based in India and work closely with Product and the Head of Engineering from the Edison, New Jersey office. The role requires close engagement with the existing platform, including authentication flows, identity federation, session and token services, and integrations, while guiding technical work toward the longer-term architecture. The manager will help deliver passwordless login, MFA, SSO, and customer integrations; uphold quality, security, performance, and availability standards; and participate directly in incident response and root-cause analysis.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including recent hands-on experience guiding technical delivery and engineering teams.
Experience building or operating authentication, SSO, or IAM platforms in production.
Ability to lead hands-on through architecture, code reviews, debugging, technical decision-making, and direct contribution when needed.
Ability to form an informed technical point of view, explain trade-offs, and make decisions when the answer is not obvious.
Experience organizing engineering work, identifying dependencies and risks, unblocking teams, and delivering quality capabilities predictably.
Experience with design and code reviews, automated testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and release readiness for highly available services.
Practical understanding of secure software development, threat modeling, data boundaries, platform security, and performance considerations in enterprise SaaS.
Ability to influence through technical depth, clarity, and follow-through while working across US- and India-based teams.
Willingness to work from Edison, New Jersey three days per week and maintain meaningful working overlap with the India-based Authentication engineering team.
Deep practical experience building, debugging, reviewing, and supporting production Node.js services using JavaScript or TypeScript.
Strong working knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, FIDO2/WebAuthn and passkeys, JWT and token lifecycle management, and NIST 800-63B authenticator assurance levels.
Experience with passwordless and multi-factor authentication, session management, adaptive or risk-based authentication, and RBAC/ABAC authorization models.
Familiarity with LDAP, Active Directory, Entra ID, SCIM provisioning, and integrations with identity providers and service providers such as Okta, Ping, and Microsoft.
Practical understanding of PKI, certificates, key management, signing and encryption, and secure secrets handling.
Strong experience with service-oriented architecture, API design, inter-service communication, resiliency patterns, scalability, and performance.
Demonstrated experience building and operating secure, scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
Strong working knowledge of AWS services, cloud deployment patterns, security, monitoring, reliability, and cost-aware operational practices.
Hands-on experience with containerized workloads, Docker, Kubernetes, deployment practices, and operational troubleshooting.
Experience with automated build, test, deployment, and rollback practices that support predictable, reliable releases.
Experience diagnosing and improving latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability in high-volume, latency-sensitive distributed systems.

Nice To Haves

Working knowledge of Java and Go; these are secondary and not mandatory.

Responsibilities

Understand the existing Authentication Platform, including authentication flows, identity federation, session and token services, and integrations, and guide the team toward technically sound designs.
Partner with Product to shape requirements, clarify trade-offs, sequence work, and translate feature requests into practical engineering plans.
Organize incoming work, clarify priorities, make dependencies visible, and keep delivery commitments on track across passwordless login, MFA, SSO, and customer integrations.
Participate in design discussions, code reviews, debugging, and technical problem-solving, and contribute directly to the codebase when needed.
Establish and uphold standards for design review, code quality, test readiness, performance, security, standards compliance, and release decisions.
Participate in incident response, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions for Authentication services, focusing on availability and login latency.
Drive sound engineering decisions across Node.js microservices, identity protocols, cloud-based SaaS deployments, Kubernetes, AWS, observability, performance, and platform resilience.
Provide daily technical direction, remove obstacles, facilitate delivery discussions, and help engineers make sound decisions.
Make timely technical decisions amid ambiguity, communicate trade-offs, and constructively challenge approaches when appropriate.
Collaborate with Product, QA, Security, and engineering peers to support a low-ego environment focused on ownership, rigor, and delivery.