authzed
Open Source, Google Zanzibar-inspired permissions database
Senior Software Engineer - U.S. or EU (remote)
About the role
The Role
At AuthZed, we’re redefining how modern applications think about access control. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of building AuthZed commercial products in the dynamic and rapidly evolving infrastructure and authorization space, aimed to manage security-critical application permissions..
This isn’t just another engineering role — it’s a chance to shape the future of our platform and drive innovation in a startup environment where your expertise and creativity will leave a lasting impact. You'll work alongside a team of passionate engineers, solving challenging problems in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and authorization models, while contributing directly to the success of customers using AuthZed’s products worldwide.
What You’ll Do
- Innovator and Creator
- Research, design, implement, test and release new features and enhancements for AuthZed’s commercial products.
- Drive Optimization efforts by gathering statistics, refining query planning, and implementing materialized views and incremental view maintenance (IVM).
- Champion of Quality: Drive best practices in software development, testing, and CI/CD to ensure our platform is robust, scalable, and always on the leading edge.
- Embrace the "operate what you build" philosophy, taking end-to-end ownership of your work - from development and deployment to production operations, and participate in on-call rotation.
- Problem Solver: Troubleshoot correctness, stability or performance issues related to statement planning and execution in a complex distributed system.
- Continuous Improver: Proactively identify opportunities to optimize processes, streamline operations, and elevate team performance.
- Collaborator and Mentor: Work closely with other engineers, product, and support teams.
- Storyteller: Showcase your work through technical documentation, blogs, and talks, representing AuthZed as a thought leader in the industry.
What You Bring
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of experience working in programming languages like Golang, python or Java. Experience with Go is a plus.
- Strong Systems engineering background (e.g. distributed systems, operating systems, databases).
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and managing distributed databases in cloud-native environments.
- Experience with modern software development practices and tools, such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), Docker, and Git.
- Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A proven ability to thrive in remote-first, cross-time-zone teams, collaborating effectively to deliver impactful results.
Nice to have
- Experience with kubernetes and experience writing operators.
- Familiarity with database concepts, and how they are implemented: compilers, indices, query planning, optimization, materialized views, etc.
- Familiarity with modern authorization systems and access control models.
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 and recently secure a $12M Series A. This funding has allowed us to further develop SpiceDB, now the open-source standard in authorization database technology, fortify our reputation as authorization experts, accelerate our open-source community growth, and scale 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-mindness
- 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.
