Senior Software Engineer - Identity & Authorization Platform

ClickHouse ClickHouse · Data AI · EMEA · Security

Senior Software Engineer role focused on building and designing platform services for authentication, authorization, and audit within ClickHouse Cloud. The role involves creating a unified access management experience, modeling permissions, implementing various identity protocols, and ensuring production reliability. It requires experience with backend systems, identity services, and distributed systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and build the platform services that power authentication, authorization, and audit across ClickHouse Cloud. This includes a unified RBAC/ReBAC service, token issuance and session handling, and the SDKs that product teams embed to make authorization decision.
  2. Model permissions and access control primitives (resources, roles, relationships, policies) that work across ClickHouse, SQL Console, ClickPipes, and HyperDX. Ship the libraries and APIs that other engineers build against.
  3. Implement protocol-level support for SAML, SCIM, OIDC, OAuth2, and MFA/passwordless flows. Own the integrations that make enterprise SSO and provisioning work end to end.
  4. Build the audit and authorization-decision telemetry pipeline so every access decision is observable, queryable, and surfaceable to customers.
  5. Partner with product engineering teams to migrate bespoke per-product auth implementations onto the shared platform, and design APIs that make adoption straightforward.

Skills

Required

  • production backend systems
  • systems language (Go, Rust, C++)
  • application language (TypeScript, Python)
  • authentication service design
  • authorization service design
  • token issuer
  • OIDC provider
  • OAuth2 provider
  • policy engine
  • permissions model
  • FGA/ReBAC system
  • Zanzibar
  • OpenFGA
  • SpiceDB
  • Cedar
  • SAML
  • SCIM
  • OIDC
  • OAuth2
  • API design
  • SDK design
  • distributed systems
  • caching strategies
  • consistency tradeoffs
  • multi-region concerns
  • identity vendors (Auth0, WorkOS, AWS/GCP/Azure IAM)
  • production debugging

Nice to have

  • Zanzibar-style authorization system
  • OpenFGA deployment
  • SpiceDB deployment
  • multi-tenant permission model
  • custom roles
  • hierarchies
  • delegation
  • ABAC attributes
  • internal SDKs

What the JD emphasized

  • Minimum 4+ years building production backend systems at scale
  • Hands-on experience designing and implementing an authentication or authorization service
  • Working knowledge of SAML, SCIM, OIDC, and OAuth2 at the protocol level
  • Experience designing APIs and SDKs that other engineers depend on
  • Experience operating distributed systems at scale
  • Strong production debugging instincts