Senior Backend Engineer - Security

DigiCert•Sunnyvale, CA

6h•$150,000 - $175,000

About The Position

We are building the trust layer for the agentic future. As AI agents move from simple chatbots to autonomous workloads with access to sensitive enterprise data, the industry lacks a standard for Identity, Authentication, and Governance. You will build the core security infrastructure that defines how agents are identified and controlled. Our mission is to build a "Zero Trust" architecture for AI—ensuring that every action an agent takes is cryptographically verifiable, authorized, and safe. You will be instrumental in setting our technical culture, selecting our stack, and scaling a platform that will secure the next generation of enterprise AI. As part of the engineering team, you’ll work alongside industry-leading cryptographers, AI/ML innovators, cloud infrastructure experts, and security engineers who are defining the future of secure digital interactions.

Requirements

Systems Mastery: Deep experience building mission-critical distributed systems. You are a master of systems-level languages (like Go or Rust) and you have built distributed high performance systems from ground up.
Identity & Security Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE, PKI, and mTLS. You understand certificate lifecycle management, OIDC, and OAuth2 at a protocol level.
Cloud-Native Networking: Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes (K8s) You have worked extensively with Envoy Proxy, Service Meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Cloud & DevOps: Experience deploying and securing production workloads on AWS, GCP, or Azure. You are comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
You have a "bias for shipping" and are comfortable building CI/CD pipelines and observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana) from scratch.

Nice To Haves

AI Experience (Desirable): Prior experience or a strong interest in working with AI Agents (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen), LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Responsibilities

Architect and build the Identity Foundation: Design and own a cryptographically secure identity system that serves as the "source of truth" for all AI workloads, ensuring every agent has a verifiable and tamper-proof digital passport.
Build Runtime Enforcement: Develop high-performance systems to control agentic interactions in real-time. You will ensure that agents operate strictly within their authorized boundaries without introducing latency.
Define Governance Logic: Create the engines that translate complex human policies into machine-executable rules, controlling how agents access tools, databases, and LLMs.
Design for Resilience and Scale: Build "secure-by-default" infrastructure that can handle thousands of concurrent autonomous agents across multi-cloud environments, ensuring the system remains tamper-proof.
Shape the Technical Culture: You will select our core stack, define our engineering standards, and help build the team.