Senior Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (IC3) to join their Customer Trust & Engineering team, focusing on Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM is crucial for trust at DigitalOcean, handling billions of transactions per second with low latency. In this role, the engineer will architect the next generation of the Identity platform, support AI initiatives, build SSO integrations for global partners, and evolve the policy engine for complex workflows. This position is ideal for someone passionate about distributed systems, security-first engineering, and building at hyperscale.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years focused on Identity (AuthN/AuthZ), Security Products, or high-scale Distributed Systems.
Expert-level proficiency in Go and a strong understanding of gRPC microservices architecture.
Deep knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC).
Proven ability to build systems that handle consensus, replication, and partitioning at cloud scale.
Working experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), SQL (MySQL), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
A track record of "unwinding" complex legacy logic into clean, maintainable abstractions.
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

Design and develop high-availability, low-latency authentication and authorization services in Go that scale to handle massive load spikes across global regions.
Build the IAM foundations for emerging cloud-native AI/ML platforms, designing secure token exchange patterns and identity context injection for agentic AI workflows.
Lead the implementation of OIDC and SAML integrations, enabling seamless federated Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise customers and strategic global partners.
Evolve the Policy Engine (using industry standards like Rego/OPA) to support advanced resource-level permissions, dynamic scoping, and network-aware access conditions.
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.
Take ownership of service reliability, from fine-tuning Kubernetes deployments to migrating legacy data pipelines to modern eventing architectures.
Proactively identify and remediate complex security vulnerabilities, ensuring auth flows are resilient against credential stuffing, session hijacking, and configuration theft.
Act as a technical lead for major workstreams, conducting deep code reviews and mentoring junior engineers in distributed systems best practices.