Software Engineering Manager of Platform Authentication & Authorization

Vantor•Westminster, CO

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Vantor is seeking a Manager of Software Engineering to lead the Platform Authentication & Authorization team. The team designs, builds, tests, delivers, and operates the identity and access capabilities that support users, administrators, and products across the platform. This role combines people leadership, technical direction, and delivery accountability. The Manager will establish priorities, develop engineers, allocate team capacity, and ensure that the team delivers secure, scalable, and reliable software. The role requires close partnership with Engineering, Product, Security, Compliance, customers, and other functional teams to turn business and technical objectives into executable plans and successful outcomes. This is a high-ownership role with a strong security and identity focus. The team's work directly affects every platform user and the administrators responsible for managing access. The ideal candidate will bring practical expertise in modern authentication and authorization, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), MFA, SSO, federation, token lifecycle management, claims, scopes, and policy enforcement. You are comfortable guiding decisions in complex, distributed systems while empowering engineers to own solution design and implementation. Vantor is an AI-forward engineering organization. We use AI-assisted development tools for design exploration, implementation, testing, documentation, threat-model checklists, migration planning, troubleshooting, and other repetitive engineering work. The Manager will help the team use these tools responsibly, with appropriate human review, validation, and security-aware engineering judgment. This position is located in Westminster. Candidates must be U.S. citizens.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship and willingness and ability to obtain a U.S. Government security clearance.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical discipline; four additional years of relevant experience may substitute for the degree.
Seven or more years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems.
At least two years of engineering-management experience, or equivalent technical-leadership experience with responsibility for mentoring engineers, coordinating delivery, and leading through complex technical challenges.
Experience leading, coaching, and developing engineers, including setting goals, establishing expectations, and providing performance feedback.
Experience working in an Agile engineering environment, including practices such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
Experience leading software modernization efforts or developing new product capabilities in complex technical environments.
Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture through development, testing, deployment, operations, and support.
Demonstrated ability to guide the design of scalable, performant, and highly available cloud services, distributed systems, or microservice-oriented architectures.
Strong understanding of production service operations, including SLAs, SLOs, incident management, observability, and operational readiness.
Practical application of secure software design and delivery practices, such as threat modeling, audit logging, secrets handling, access-review workflows, vulnerability remediation, and secure SDLC controls.
Experience building and consuming REST APIs with appropriate versioning, validation, authorization checks, observability, and error handling.
Strong communication, judgment, and collaboration skills, with the ability to evaluate technical and organizational tradeoffs and influence across teams.
Experience working with AI-assisted development tools, with disciplined validation and security-aware review of generated output.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with Keycloak, including realm and client configuration, identity-provider integration, protocol mappers, roles and groups, administrative APIs, or identity-extension development.
Deep practical knowledge of OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, including authorization code with PKCE, client credentials, refresh-token handling, JWT validation, key rotation, scopes, claims, token lifetimes, and revocation patterns.
Strong working knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, including the broader Spring ecosystem.
Experience with modern authentication and authorization practices, including MFA, SSO, federation, RBAC, ABAC or policy-based access control, identity lifecycle management, service accounts, and least-privilege design.
Experience with relational databases, SQL, schema-migration tooling, and event-driven architectures using a message broker.
Experience with TypeScript and a modern frontend framework such as Vue, React, or Angular.
Development and architecture experience with AWS and related cloud services.
Experience with Kubernetes or EKS, service meshes, multi-service environments, and hybrid deployments.
Strong background in observability technologies such as Elastic, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or AWS CloudWatch.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop a team of software engineers with varied skills and areas of expertise.
Establish team goals, performance expectations, development plans, and accountability; provide timely, meaningful feedback.
Translate organizational and product objectives into clear engineering priorities, plans, schedules, and measurable outcomes.
Plan staffing and capacity, identify skill gaps, allocate resources, and support budget and cost objectives as appropriate.
Partner with Product Management and stakeholders to clarify requirements, evaluate priorities and tradeoffs, and translate business needs into executable engineering work.
Identify risks, dependencies, resource constraints, and competing priorities early; drive decisions and resolution.
Coordinate work across engineering teams and functional organizations when delivery requires shared ownership or dependencies.
Guide the team through complex software design, development, integration, testing, deployment, and production-support challenges.
Improve engineering processes, practices, and operating procedures to strengthen delivery, quality, and team effectiveness.
Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, accountability, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
Oversee services supporting user identity, account lifecycle, access control, product entitlements, policy enforcement, and administrator workflows.
Guide the design and implementation of OAuth 2.0 and OIDC flows, including authorization code with PKCE, client credentials, refresh tokens, token validation, token revocation, claims, scopes, and service-to-service authentication.
Deliver secure MFA, SSO, federation, identity brokering, external identity-provider integration, and session-management capabilities.
Configure, extend, and operate Keycloak, including realms, clients, roles, groups, protocol mappers, identity providers, administrative APIs, custom extensions, and production-support patterns.
Guide development of the TypeScript/Vue 3 administrator application used to manage users, accounts, permissions, and policy-driven access.
Ensure identity and access services are designed for appropriate availability, performance, observability, auditability, and operational support.
Partner with Security and Compliance to apply threat modeling, secure SDLC practices, audit logging, secrets management, access reviews, vulnerability remediation, and relevant control expectations, including NIST, ISO 27001, and CMMC.
Support capabilities that capture and surface platform usage and access data for reporting, billing, analytics, and operational insight.
Promote and oversee AI-assisted engineering for implementation, test generation, documentation, troubleshooting, and design analysis, with disciplined validation and human review.