Software Engineer, Identity

Keycard Labs

2d•Remote

About The Position

We're hiring a Staff Identity Engineer to design and build the core identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard — the infrastructure that lets agents prove trust, enforce policy, and operate autonomously at global scale. Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity propagation, policy enforcement, audit logging, and runtime governance. The systems you build need to be dynamic, multi-tenant, and fast — delivering auth decisions in under 10ms across cloud, edge, and hybrid deployments. Your work will span from core distributed services to the SDKs and APIs that developers use, ensuring a seamless, trusted experience end to end. You'll work directly with founders, product, design, and the engineers building our SDKs and platform services. You'll also help shape how we use agents internally — contributing to how Keycard becomes an agent-native engineering organization, not just a company that builds for one.

Requirements

Deep experience building and operating identity, authentication, and authorization systems.
Understanding of OAuth, SCIM, OIDC, mTLS, and related primitives, treating them as products.
Strong distributed systems instincts, designing for security, multi-tenancy, and reliability.
Clear thinking about consensus, transactionality, and extensible data models.
Proficiency in Go, Rust, or similar languages, comfortable across the stack from core systems to SDKs and APIs.
Experience thriving in 0→1 environments, making hard trade-offs to ship today while laying groundwork for the long-term system.
Ability to lead by example, raising technical excellence and helping others grow.
Clear communication through written plans and async updates, knowing when to use calls.
Experience with identity, security, or CNCF projects.
Experience building and shaping developer ecosystems.

Nice To Haves

Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and strong opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them.
Experience designing extensible systems (WASM, plugin frameworks, dynamic policy engines).
A track record of designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics.
Contributions to open source identity, security, or CNCF projects.

Responsibilities

Design and build the core identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard.
Develop infrastructure that allows agents to prove trust, enforce policy, and operate autonomously at global scale.
Build dynamic, multi-tenant, and fast systems capable of delivering auth decisions in under 10ms across cloud, edge, and hybrid deployments.
Work on core distributed services, SDKs, and APIs for a seamless, trusted end-to-end experience.
Collaborate directly with founders, product, design, and other engineers.
Shape the internal use of agents and contribute to Keycard becoming an agent-native engineering organization.