Sr. Software Engineer: Control Plane

About AuthZed:

We’re pioneering open-source authorization solutions for scaling businesses tackling complex end-user permissions in zero-trust architectures. Our focus is on providing SpiceDB—the most mature open-source permissions database inspired by Google’s Zanzibar system—and building managed services that enable planet-scale production authorization services.

Our strategic approach to capital-raising has empowered us to efficiently utilize our $3.9M seed fund. We’ve developed SpiceDB, now the open source standard in authorization database technology, fortified our reputation as authorization experts, accelerated our open-source community growth, and are scaling revenue with robust enterprise products.

AuthZed is a fully remote company with employees across the US and Europe. We’re a hardworking group with a software-driven culture; even our sales team understands and loves our technology! We bring integrity to all our interactions, fostering confidence in decision making - trusting and respecting each voice on our team, every day.

Company Values:

• Agency: Everyone should have the capability, freedom, and confidence to bring about changes to our business and product. Organizational processes exist to clearly define our goals, but not restrict how progress is made.

• Collaboration: Success is defined in various dimensions and no single person can be an expert in all of them. Without valuing the opinions of others, finding compromises, and sharing mutual trust and respect, you cannot arrive at the best possible solution.

• Open-mindedness: Without asking questions, testing assumptions, and questioning our pre-existing biases we risk operating within an echo-chamber. We celebrate the representation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds as a catalyst for creating an inclusive work environment that everyone can appreciate.

About the Role:

At AuthZed, we’re redefining how modern applications think about access control.

AuthZed Cloud is an Authorization Infrastructure as a Service, designed to power real-time access control for production applications. Authorization decisions sit on the critical path of customer systems, which means correctness, performance, and availability are foundational requirements.

The control plane manages how customer authorization infrastructure is provisioned, secured, configured, and evolved over time.

This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, Kubernetes-native platforms, security-sensitive domains, and billing-critical workflows.

You’ll collaborate closely with frontend engineers, SRE, and Product to ensure AuthZed Cloud is reliable, secure, and transparent for customers.

What you’ll own:

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services and APIs that power AuthZed Cloud’s control plane.

• Build and operate Kubernetes-native systems, including custom operators and controllers, to manage customer environments and infrastructure lifecycle.

• Design durable, idempotent workflows for provisioning, configuration changes, scaling, and deletion.

• Implement and integrate authentication and identity flows (e.g., SSO, SAML, OAuth/OIDC) in a secure, multi-tenant SaaS environment.

• Implement and evolve usage-based billing systems.

• Engineer distributed systems that behave correctly under partial failure, retries, concurrency, and long-running operations.

• Collaborate closely with frontend engineers to design APIs and workflows that result in clear, reliable user experiences.

• Ensure services are observable and operable through structured logging, metrics, and alerts.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues involving orchestration, authentication, or state management.

• Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to incident resolution and post-incident improvements.

• Document APIs, workflows, system behavior, and operational guidelines.

What you bring:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent education, experience, and training in Computer Science or a related field.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in cloud computing (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and kubernetes

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud native technologies such as kubernetes

• Strong Kubernetes experience, including designing or operating controllers/operators.

• Experience implementing or integrating authentication systems (e.g., SSO, SAML, OAuth/OIDC).

• Experience working with relational databases and transactional data models.

• Ownership mindset, self-direction, and a passion for solving complex problems

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills: proven ability to build alignment across teams

Extra shine:

• Experience working with or integrating AI-powered systems or tooling

• Familiarity with modern authorization systems and access control models.

Life at AuthZed:

• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology in a rapidly growing sector.

• A supported environment where your ideas lead to real impact.

• Competitive salary based on experience.

• Stock options at an early-stage startup.

• Comprehensive benefits including healthcare (US-based) and other insurance.

• A full remote and flexible schedule to accommodate different timezones

• Twice-yearly travel for team offsites focused on team bonding, collaboration, and having fun!