Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity

Vanta · Enterprise · U.S. · Remote · Software Engineering

Senior Backend Software Engineer focused on Identity services for Vanta, a security compliance company. The role involves leading complex projects, mentoring engineers, and developing identity primitives for agentic capabilities, ensuring safety and governance at scale. While AI is mentioned as a tool to amplify skills, the core responsibilities are in backend development, identity, and distributed systems, not direct AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. As Vanta expands its agentic capabilities across surfaces like MCP, CLI, and the Vanta Agent, the Identity team is at the center of a new set of problems: defining what it means for an agent to act as a user's proxy, enforcing consistent permission checks across every invocation surface, and building an attribution model that makes agent-assisted actions auditable and trustworthy.
  2. You'll help design the identity primitives that make autonomous agent behavior safe and governable at scale.
  3. Lead complex projects with multiple stakeholders and engineers to enable our business and team to scale
  4. Collaborate with Security to ensure Vanta's platform implements best practices for customer data
  5. Support design reviews, communicate constraints, and help engineers make the right trade-offs

Skills

Required

  • backend development
  • authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML)
  • identity federation concepts (SSO)
  • authorization frameworks (RBAC, policy-based access control)
  • platform services
  • data modeling
  • distributed systems
  • security practices
  • technical migrations
  • mentoring engineers

Nice to have

  • AI to amplify skills
  • AI responsibly

What the JD emphasized

  • at least 8 years of industry experience with backend development
  • Strong knowledge of authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML) and identity federation concepts (SSO), or authorization frameworks (RBAC, policy-based access control)
  • Experience building platform services that scale across multiple teams
  • Security-focused mindset and understanding of enterprise security practices
  • Have led technical projects spanning months