Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management
About The Position
This is a Staff Engineer role on the team that manages identity and access for AlphaSense's entire, and constantly growing, customer base, and that nearly every product engineering team depends on for user and entitlement data. You'll work across all three pillars of identity: creating and managing users, authenticating them, and authorizing what they can do — designing systems built to scale with a constantly growing number of users. Security is core to this role, not adjacent to it — you'll work closely with our security teams to make sure what we build is secure by design, in an environment governed by SOC2 and GDPR. We're looking for a genuinely senior, self-sufficient engineer with strong experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms at scale, ideally in a platform/product-platform engineering context. This is someone who doesn't just execute a roadmap, but helps understand the needs behind it, shapes it, and then drives execution — largely autonomously, and in close collaboration with our core team based in Helsinki. You're genuinely interested in security, comfortable partnering closely with security teams on secure-by-design systems, and comfortable working in a distributed, cross-timezone setup — based in North America, collaborating closely with a Helsinki-based team.
Requirements
- Backend: Java 2X, Spring Boot 3.X.X, WebFlux, Maven
- Data & APIs: SQL, GraphQL, gRPC, REST
- Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Helm
- Identity & Security Protocols: RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC; OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and JWT; SAML 2.0 and enterprise SSO federation (assertion validation, signature/encryption handling, IdP- vs. SP-initiated flows); SCIM for user provisioning and deprovisioning
- Engineering Practices: Event-driven architecture patterns; TDD or a genuine passion for automated testing
Nice To Haves
- Auth0 experience
- SpiceDB / Zanzibar-style authorization system experience
- Apollo Federation
- OpenTelemetry
- Experience operating within SOC2 and/or GDPR-compliant environments
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and evolve our authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), enabling teams across the company to answer "what can this user do?"
- Design, build, and evolve our authentication platform, covering authentication patterns across our range of use cases, working closely with our Auth0 integration
- Design, build, and evolve our user management platform — creating, provisioning, and managing user identities and entitlements — supporting our entire customer base
- Partner closely with security teams to ensure our authentication, authorization, and user management platforms are secure by design and aligned with SOC2 and GDPR requirements
- Design and implement highly scalable systems that keep pace with a constantly growing number of users and customers
- Help define the long-term roadmap across all three domains — authentication, authorization, and user management — not just execute against one handed to you
- Build self-service systems and APIs (GraphQL, gRPC, REST) that make authentication, authorization, and user data consumable by product engineering teams across the company
- Drive projects autonomously from North America while staying closely aligned with our Helsinki-based team
- Champion strong testing, observability, and reliability practices across the platform
Benefits
- equity
- a generous benefits program
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
