Senior Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management

DigitalOcean • Seattle, WA

6h • Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (IC3) to join their Customer Trust & Engineering team, specifically focusing on Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM is described as the bedrock of trust at DigitalOcean, with its services being critical to every request, authorizing billions of transactions per second with single-digit millisecond latency. In this role, the engineer will be responsible for architecting the next generation of the Identity platform, rather than just maintaining existing systems. Key initiatives include supporting AI initiatives, building seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations for global partners, and evolving the policy engine to support complex, agentic workflows. The position is ideal for individuals passionate about distributed systems, security-first engineering, and building at hyperscale.

Requirements

• Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years focused on Identity (AuthN/AuthZ), Security Products, or high-scale Distributed Systems.
• Language Expert: Expert-level proficiency in Go and a strong understanding of gRPC microservices architecture.
• Identity Specialist: Deep knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC).
• Distributed Systems Guru: Proven ability to build systems that handle consensus, replication, and partitioning at cloud scale.
• Cloud Native: Working experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), SQL (MySQL), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Problem Solver: A track record of "unwinding" complex legacy logic into clean, maintainable abstractions.
• Communication: Ability to communicate technical strategy to senior leadership and collaborate across teams (Inference, Billing, DOKS).

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Rego.
• Familiarity with Cloud-native deployment strategies (Canary/Blue-Green) via kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Architect for Scale: Design and develop high-availability, low-latency authentication and authorization services in Go that scale to handle massive load spikes across global regions.
• Drive Next-Gen Innovation: Build the IAM foundations for emerging cloud-native AI/ML platforms, designing secure token exchange patterns and identity context injection for agentic AI workflows.
• Modernize Identity: Lead the implementation of OIDC and SAML integrations, enabling seamless federated Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise customers and strategic global partners.
• Solve Complex AuthZ: Evolve our Policy Engine (using industry standards like Rego/OPA) to support advanced resource-level permissions, dynamic scoping, and network-aware access conditions.
• Evolve Identity Models: Design and scale robust, multi-tenant data models to manage complex hierarchical structures (users, teams, organizations, and resource boundaries) that map to enterprise customer needs.
• Operational Excellence: Take ownership of service reliability, from fine-tuning Kubernetes deployments to migrating legacy data pipelines to modern eventing architectures.
• Security First: Proactively identify and remediate complex security vulnerabilities, ensuring our auth flows are resilient against credential stuffing, session hijacking, and configuration theft.
• Mentor & Lead: Act as a technical lead for major workstreams, conducting deep code reviews and mentoring junior engineers in distributed systems best practices.

Benefits

• competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few.
• reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
• All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
• You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance.
• equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees