Principal Engineer - Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM)

Fastly•San Francisco, NY

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Join our dynamic Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) team as a Principal Software Engineer and play a pivotal role in building cutting-edge solutions that centralize and simplify how organizations manage user identities and profile data. Our CIAM team is committed to empowering customers with control over user access by providing advanced access control mechanisms, innovative authentication methods, progressive profiling, and a unified identity experience. We are looking for passionate, highly skilled software engineers to join our team and be an integral part of our mission. If you're eager to make a significant impact and contribute to the growth of a thriving CIAM ecosystem, we would love to have you on board. Let's build something remarkable together!

Requirements

Significant experience designing and operating authentication and authorization systems in production environments.
Most Principals at Fastly have at least 10 years of related experience.
Deep understanding of identity and access standards and technologies such as OIDC, OAuth, SAML, SCIM, JWT, and SSO.
Experience with service-to-service authentication and secure communication patterns in distributed systems.
Strong background in software architecture and system design, especially in areas of scalability, performance, reliability, and security.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple teams and influence engineering direction at senior levels.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation and align diverse stakeholders.
Track record of mentoring and growing other engineers, both within your domain of expertise and more broadly across engineering.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Keycloak
Production experience implementing Role and Attribute-based Access control systems
Experience with Go, Java, or Ruby

Responsibilities

Lead the technical direction, architecture, and evolution of Fastly’s CIAM systems and services.
Design and build secure, scalable solutions for authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, and related platform capabilities.
Partner with engineering, product, and security teams to define roadmaps, align priorities, and address technical risks early.
Drive adoption of modern, standards-based identity patterns and best practices across teams and systems.
Improve the reliability, security, and maintainability of identity-related services through strong architectural decisions and operational rigor.
Mentor engineers across the organization, helping raise the quality of technical design, implementation, and collaboration.
Contribute to an inclusive engineering culture grounded in curiosity, pragmatism, and continuous improvement.
Participate in on-call support rotation as needed.