Senior Backend Software Engineer, Authorization

Bytedance • San Jose, CA

1d • $187,040 - $359,720

About The Position

Welcome to the Authorization Services Team! We are the backbone of the company's security infrastructure, responsible for providing cutting-edge authorization services that are integral to nearly every employee and microservice within our organization. Our mission is to develop and sustain a state-of-the-art model that enforces the principle of least privilege throughout all operations. Our user-friendly interfaces enable employees and microservices to interact seamlessly with our authorization systems, making complex security protocols both accessible and manageable. Our authorization services are highly data-intensive and operate at scale, requiring solutions to classic and complex backend challenges to achieve consistently high throughput and low latency. As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping, building, and evolving these systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with 4+ years of experience building, operating, and scaling production backend systems.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Go, Java, Python, C++ or similar.
• Proven experience writing comprehensive automated tests, performing effective code reviews, and debugging complex production issues to ensure high standards of code quality and reliability.

Nice To Haves

• Solid experience designing backend systems, including RESTful APIs, microservices or service-oriented architectures, and data models using SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Demonstrated experience building and optimizing high-throughput, high-availability systems, with a strong understanding of performance tuning and scalability trade-offs.
• Practical knowledge of backend security principles and best practices, including authentication, authorization, least-privilege access, and secure service-to-service.
• Experience leading design discussions, mentoring engineers, and raising the technical bar through code reviews and engineering best practices.
• Strong ability to collaborate cross-functionally with product, infrastructure, and security teams to deliver end-to-end backend solutions.

Responsibilities

• System Design and Ownership: Lead the design, implementation, and long-term maintenance of critical backend services or our authorization systems, making sound architectural decisions that balance scalability, reliability, and security.
• Performance and Scalability: Drive performance optimization efforts across the stack, proactively identifying bottlenecks and implementing solutions to support high throughput, low latency, and predictable system behavior under load.
• Security Leadership: Champion security best practices by design, including least-privilege principles, defense-in-depth strategies, and secure coding standards, ensuring our authorization services meet high security and compliance requirements.
• Code Quality and Engineering Excellence: Set a high bar for code quality through thoughtful design, thorough reviews, and comprehensive automated testing, improving the maintainability, reliability, and robustness of the codebase.
• Troubleshooting and Reliability: Lead complex debugging and incident resolution efforts, develop tools and processes to improve observability, and contribute to the overall reliability and availability of our systems.
• Collaboration and Technical Leadership: Collaborate closely with engineers, security specialists, product partners, and stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions, mentor junior engineers, and influence the team's technical direction and best practices.

Benefits

• Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others.
• Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees