Senior Software Engineer – Authentication & Authorization - RTP

VAST Data•Raleigh, NC

13d•Onsite

About The Position

VAST Data is looking to add a Senior Software Engineer – Authentication & Authorization to our growing team! This is a unique opportunity to join one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies in history—at the heart of the AI revolution. VAST’s data management vision is the future of the market. At VAST, we’re building the data platform for the AI era—software infrastructure that powers the capture, refinement, protection, and activation of massive datasets across data center, edge, and cloud. Our platform is redefining what’s possible in high-performance, scalable data systems, and we’re just getting started. We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to build high-performance authentication and authorization services for a large-scale distributed storage system. You'll design and implement systems that make authorization decisions on the critical path of storage requests, balancing low latency, correctness, and scalability while integrating efficiently with external AAA services. This is a systems engineering role. You'll work in modern C/C++ on Linux, own features end-to-end, and solve production problems that only emerge at scale. The systems you build will handle demanding enterprise workloads where correctness, observability, and performance are equally important. If you enjoy understanding systems deeply, debugging complex production behavior, and taking ownership of critical infrastructure, you'll fit well on this team.

Requirements

Strong software engineering experience with modern C/C++
Experience building production systems in one or more of the following areas: Distributed systems, Storage systems, Networking or TCP/IP, Infrastructure software
Strong understanding of concurrency, synchronization, failure handling, and long-running services
Comfortable working close to operating system, storage, and networking boundaries
Demonstrated ownership of production systems from design through long-term maintenance
Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
Passion for building reliable infrastructure software that operates at scale

Responsibilities

Design and implement authentication and authorization services in C/C++
Integrate efficiently with external AAA services and their wire protocols
Build low-latency, highly scalable authorization paths for distributed storage workloads
Own features from requirements and design through implementation, testing, rollout, and production support
Debug complex production issues using traces, metrics, and logs
Optimize performance, scalability, and resource utilization under realistic workloads
Improve the observability, reliability, and maintainability of the system
Work directly on problems encountered by enterprise customers and AI infrastructure deployments
Make sound technical decisions around access control APIs, external AAA integration, caching strategies, correctness, performance, and operability
Own significant areas of the codebase and drive their technical direction
Turn ambiguous requirements into well-designed, production-ready solutions
Maintain a high engineering bar for code quality, testing, and operational excellence
Write software that remains reliable under concurrency, retries, failover, and large-scale production workloads
Improve the simplicity, observability, and maintainability of the system over time