The RoleWe'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.
What We're Looking For- You have deep experience building and operating identity, authentication, and authorization systems. You understand OAuth, SCIM, OIDC, mTLS, and related primitives - and you treat them as products, not just infrastructure.
- Strong distributed systems instincts. You design for security, multi-tenancy, and reliability, with clear thinking about consensus, transactionality, and extensible data models.
- You're a programmer first - fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages, comfortable moving across the stack from core systems and infrastructure to SDKs and APIs.
- You thrive in 01 environments. You make hard trade-offs to ship today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, and you use iteration to accelerate the learning loop.
- You lead by example - raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow. You communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.
Strong Candidates May Also Have- 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 - so developers and organizations can tailor platforms to their needs.
- A track record of designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics that other developers depend on.
- Contributions to open source identity, security, or CNCF projects, or experience building and shaping developer ecosystems.
What We Offer- Build at the Frontier: Work every day at the frontier of agent-native systems - shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn't been built before. You'll be given huge autonomy, the opportunity to gain mastery, and the chance to work in a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.
- Truly Agent-Native Culture: At Keycard, we don't just enable others to adopt agents - we use them ourselves to build. You'll help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage.
- Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) give you the security to focus on building - and the asymmetric upside of ownership in a company chasing a category-defining mission.
- Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, plus 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to fully recharge.
- Tools That Keep You Ahead: A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and the best AI tools available so you can work at the forefront of agent-native workflows.
- Remote-First Flexibility: We are a remote-first team prioritizing asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. Work where you're strongest - we just want the best.
