Principal Engineer

About Keycard

Keycard is on a mission to redefine machine identity for the AI Era—empowering developers to seamlessly connect people, agents, and services across networks, clouds, and applications. As generative AI and agent-based workflows grow more sophisticated, they demand real-time, adaptable access patterns. Keycard unlocks dynamic, identity-based credentials, ensuring every agent and service operates with precise, contextual permissions—creating a robust foundation for trusted AI systems.

We envision a global identity network, underpinned by open protocols, allowing distributed systems to adapt dynamically, scaling to handle complex AI workloads, and maintain cryptographically verifiable trust relationships. By rethinking secret management and machine identity from first principles, our goal is to delight developers, meet the performance demands of platform engineers, and establish new security primitives for cloud-native architectures—all in an inclusive, collaborative environment focused on consistent, high-quality execution and crafting products that developers love so much they bring them everywhere they go.

What You'll Do

→ Create the Future of Identity: Be at the forefront of how developers use and build applications with AI, enabling them to bring agents and AI-powered services to production by inventing the missing pieces to enable trustworthy AI.

→ Build Reliable, Pragmatic Systems: Shape key architectural decisions supported with clear design goals. Drive discovery work, from picking the right technologies to balancing trade-offs that deliver immediate value while ensuring future scalability.

→ Be Hands On: Take complete ownership of projects from start to finish. Work across our stack—deploying infrastructure, building core systems, and developing our SDK ecosystem. Whether you're creating new systems from scratch or refining existing ones, you'll elevate our technology and set the standard for the entire company everywhere you go.

→ Mentor & Grow Talent: Build the team through hands-on work—review code, lead design sessions, and foster a culture of iterative craftsmanship. Develop not just great software systems, but also great systems of people to create secure, scalable, and delightful products.

→ Shape Engineering Culture: Work side-by-side with founders to set the tone for how we build software, approach strategic decisions, and create an environment that values collaboration, iterative delivery, and solving meaningful problems with pragmatic design.

What We're Looking For

→ Versatile Experience: 10+ years of building scalable, reliable distributed systems with expertise using technologies like TypeScript, Go or any other systems programming language like Rust or Zig, Kubernetes, and Terraform on modern clouds such as GCP, Azure, and AWS.

→ Ownership Mindset: Someone who takes responsibility for the company's success, can lead through change and manage ambiguity, drives consistent and iterative progress by balancing long-term vision with delivering immediate value, and most importantly, someone who believes in enabling autonomy and self-actualization.

→ Builder & Product-Minded: A hands-on engineer passionate about crafting functional, beautiful products that developers love who prefers writing code to long documents but knows when to step back and do design work to bring others along to build the best systems.

→ Technical Leader with Security Expertise: An engineer with deep knowledge of security and distributed systems, with experience designing and operating resilient high-availability systems. They can drive key architectural decisions that are well communicated, fostering collaboration, empathy, and growth throughout their team.

→ Curious & Growth-Oriented: Continuously learning, challenging assumptions, and staying ahead of industry trends with a deep excitement about the future of AI & computing with a desire to bring those around them along for the ride.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

→ Experience building scaled developer tools, infrastructure, and platform systems in a past role, such as observability systems, identity infrastructure, or data storage systems with high-availability requirements.

→ Built production public key infrastructure or have experience building cryptographic systems with understandable security models or have built enterprise key management for multi-tenant systems.

→ Developed global-scale multi-tenant infrastructure and are excited about the prospects of edge computing infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, Vercel, or Fly.io.

→ A passion for contributing to or creating open source software and ecosystems with an eye towards drawing the line between what should be open source and what must be kept closed source.

→ An appreciation for data-driven decision making with an addiction to instrumentation and metrics gathering to help shed light on ground truth.

→ A desire to automate their work as much as possible and have built agents or tools using LLMs in their personal life or in a past role with an excitement about the future of AI.

What We Offer

→ Competitive Compensation & Equity: Market-competitive salaries with generous equity packages for early employees, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff.

→ Comprehensive Benefits: Competitive health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, so you can focus on building and staying healthy.

→ Flexible, Remote-First Work: As a remote-first company, we prioritize asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. We want to hire the best.

→ Time Off to Recharge: We offer 4 weeks of vacation, 11 statutory holidays, 1 volunteer day, and parental leave. We encourage at least 2 weeks off annually to recharge so you can show up and push forward every day.

→ Autonomy & Impact: Join our team and shape not only our technology but also what we build and how we build it. You'll be empowered to make meaningful decisions, grow in your craft, and lead at the forefront of the AI infrastructure that is transforming the future of work.

→ Top-of-the-Line Equipment: A new MacBook Pro plus a $500 stipend for peripherals (headphones, mic, camera) so you can collaborate at your best.

→ Access to the latest AI tools: The way developers build software is evolving. To lead this transition and stay at the forefront of agent-driven workflows, you need the most powerful developer capabilities available.

Why Join Us?

Core Mission

Keycard is driving a fundamental shift in AI infrastructure: enabling trusted, autonomous agents through dynamic, identity-driven access controls. This is a rare opportunity to help define how AI systems interact and operate in production environments.

Technical Impact

You'll help invent and shape the critical infrastructure that enables widespread adoption of AI in production use cases, reinventing how developers build and deploy autonomous systems while ensuring they remain secure and trustworthy.

Culture & Team

By joining as an early employee, you'll have the opportunity to help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined AI development, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact. You'll collaborate with founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Okta, Auth0, Signal Sciences, Heroku, Kraken, and Salesforce.

If you're energized by the intersection of AI systems and distributed infrastructure and want to advance both developer productivity and AI security, with a hunger to learn & have an impact, we'd love to explore how you can help us shape the future of software.