Software Engineer, Agent Auth

Vercel • San Francisco, CA

5d • $196,000 - $294,000

About The Position

Vercel is hiring a Software Engineer for its Agent Auth and Identity team. The role focuses on building systems that enable people and agents to authenticate, delegate access, and act safely across Vercel and connected customer services. This foundational work includes identity and authorization systems that support agents acting on behalf of people and teams.

The scope spans credential issuance and scoping for autonomous agents, as well as developer-facing APIs and SDKs that make secure authentication easy to adopt. The engineer will own systems end-to-end, from design through long-term operation in production, and work on emerging questions around agent identity, trust, and authorization.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience designing, building, and operating backend systems in production at scale.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript or a comparable backend language, and willingness to work primarily in TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of authentication and authorization concepts, such as sessions, tokens, OAuth/OIDC flows, permission models, and secrets management.
• Security-minded engineering approach that considers threat models, least privilege, and failure modes during design.
• Track record of end-to-end ownership, from design and implementation through long-term operation.
• Ability to reason about architectural tradeoffs and balance long-term vision with pragmatic delivery.
• Strong cross-team collaboration skills and ability to drive alignment toward shared goals.
• Curiosity and comfort working in a fast-moving space where the right answers are still being figured out.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or operating identity providers, authentication platforms, or access-control systems used by other developers.
• Experience with delegated authorization, workload identity, service-to-service authentication, or machine credentials.
• Experience working on LLM-powered agents, tool calling, or protocols such as MCP.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Familiarity with React or Next.js.
• Contributions to open-source projects or standards bodies.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate identity, authentication, and authorization systems for Vercel and its customers, supporting both people and agents.
• Develop ways for agents to establish identity, act on behalf of users and teams, and receive scoped, time-bound, auditable access.
• Build secure, scalable APIs, services, and SDKs that make authentication straightforward for developers and their agents.
• Work with modern and emerging standards, including OAuth 2.x, OIDC, and agent-focused protocols, and help influence their development.
• Lead projects end-to-end by identifying opportunities, setting technical direction, and delivering improvements in security, reliability, and developer experience.
• Partner with product, security, and platform teams across Vercel to strengthen identity across its products.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and take responsibility for the reliability of critical systems.
• Contribute to open source and the broader community discussion about agent identity and trust.
• Write clean, efficient, tested, and well-documented code.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive healthcare package.
• Mentorship and attendance at events to build professional networks and skills.
• Flexible time off.
• Equipment needed for the role and a work-from-home budget to outfit the employee's workspace.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed