Staff Identity Engineer

About Keycard

At Keycard, we’re building identity & access infrastructure for the agent-native era—where software isn’t static, but a dynamic, constantly changing system of AI agents working on behalf of people and businesses to complete dynamic tasks at runtime.

Our mission is to unlock the agent economy by empowering developers and enterprises with the secure, scalable foundations they need to build, deploy, adopt, and trust agentic applications. To do this, we’re building the real-time, in-band, contextual guardrails required to transition from human-driven to truly autonomous and agentic workflows that give users, builders, and security teams the confidence and control they need to bring agents out of the lab and into production.

At our core, we’re laser-focused on delivering a delightful, best-in-class developer experience that gives them the tools they need to create category-defining applications and experiences while giving platform and security teams the security, scalability, visibility, control, and enablement they need to accelerate their organizations journey to becoming agent native.

We’re a small, distributed team of repeat founders and builders, with backgrounds from Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku, and we’re backed by world-class investors including Boldstart, a16z, and Acrew Capital. Joining Keycard now means helping define not just our technology, but also the culture and company we’re building together—during a once-in-a-generation platform shift.

The Role

We’re hiring a Staff Identity Engineer to help invent the next generation of identity & access control infrastructure - unlocking the true potential of trusted, autonomous agents and enabling businesses, consumers, and developers to transition from static, human-driven point and click experiences to asynchronous agent-driven, human-controlled workflows.

Your mission is to build the identity, authentication, authorization, and data systems at the heart of Keycard. These are dynamic, asynchronous, reliable, and trusted services designed for global scale, capable of authentication and authorization decisions in under 10ms. Your work will not only empower users to adopt agents they can trust, but enable developers to build best-in-class agentic experiences that are secure-by-design.

You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with founders, product, design, engineering, and customers, shaping the product together, not in a silo. You’ll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help create the foundation for the next generation of software.

This is a unique opportunity to:

• Invent Agent-Native Identity: Design and build the core authentication, authorization, and data systems that underpin Keycard, redefining how machines and agents prove trust in the AI era integrated deeply into MCP, A2A and leading agentic frameworks.

• Build Dynamic, Trusted Systems: Deliver distributed, asynchronous services that provide strong security guarantees and perform authentication and authorization enforcement in under 10ms — enabling developers to put agents into production with confidence.

• Work Across the Product Surface: Contribute from SDKs and developer-facing APIs to the core identity and data systems that power them, ensuring a seamless, trusted developer-first experience end to end.

• Become Agent-Native: Use agents everyday to build Keycard, and help shape the future of agentic coding. You’ll contribute to how our team adopts, experiments with, and refines agent workflows — pushing Keycard to become a best-in-class agentic engineering organization.

• Join a Mission-Driven Team: Work alongside an incredible group of repeat founders and builders who collaborate with low ego, care deeply about hands-on shipping, have a high-quality bar, and are united in their dedication to creating beautiful, agent-native products that empower developers to build the future of agentic software.

What We’re Looking For

• Identity & Authorization Systems Expertise: Deep experience building and operating core identity, authentication, and authorization systems. You understand and can implement protocols like OAuth, OIDC, TLS, and related primitives — and you treat them not just as infrastructure, but as products that empower developers to build incredible experiences with strong, reliable identity primitives.
  

• Design for Security & Trust: Proven ability to design distributed systems that are not only reliable, but secure, multi-tenant, and built on simple and extensible data models with strong guarantees around consensus and transactionality. You know how to balance flexibility with determinism to deliver systems developers can depend on.
  

• Hands-On Builder at Heart: A programmer first, you thrive on writing code, designing APIs, and building distributed services. You’re fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages and have built systems that developers rely on every day. You’re excited to move across the stack, solving problems wherever they arise — from SDKs and APIs to core systems and infrastructure.
  

• Iterative Delivery in 0→1: You thrive in ambiguous early-stage environments, using iteration to accelerate the learning loop. You make the hard trade-offs to deliver quickly today while zooming out to ensure those choices lay the groundwork for a great long-term system.
  

• Empathetic Leader & Collaborator: You combine empathy for developers, teammates, and customers with a craftsperson’s mindset. You lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you succeed.
  

• Remote Collaboration Mastery: Experience in distributed teams; you communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, but know when to align quickly over a call or a doc.
  

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Agent-Native Builder: Actively experimenting with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and forming strong opinions on how organizations can adopt coding agents to empower every developer. You go beyond simply using agents, you are experimenting with building your own to understand the next generation of software.
  

• Extensible, Plugin-Driven Systems: Experience designing systems to be extended — with WASM, plugin frameworks, or dynamic policy engines — so developers and organizations can tailor platforms to their needs.
  

• API & Library Craft: A passion for designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics that make it easy for developers to adopt, extend, and trust complex systems quickly.
  

• Open Source Credibility: Contributions to CNCF, identity, or security projects, or experience building and shaping developer ecosystems.
  

Vision for the Future: Strong opinions about where identity, agents, and the future of work are headed — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard.

What We Offer

• Mission-Orientated Culture: Join a team laser-focused on delivering the future of identity and access controls for agents – a once in a generation opportunity to build the foundational infrastructure and help define the protocols and primitives necessary to unlock the real potential of agents and help build an industry-defining company from the ground up.

• Be Heads-Down & Focused: Feel the impact of your work everyday, building, inventing, and iterating on all aspects of our product. Spend your time being heads-down shipping at the forefront of agentic systems and wake up every day understanding the significance of your contributions with a team who wants to win.

• Become Agent Native: At Keycard we don’t just empower others to become agent native but we are laser focused on building a company that leverages the true power of AI to create an organization that not only ships, but builds its foundation on-top of agent-native workflows as an enduring competitive advantage.

• Gain Autonomy & Mastery: By joining our team, you don’t just shape our systems and technology but also the product we’re creating and how we create it. You’ll be empowered to make meaningful decisions, grow in your craft, and lead us as we work to transform the future of work.

• Competitive Compensation & Equity: We pay market-competitive salaries with generous equity packages (4 year vest, 1 year cliff), ensuring that you can be heads-down building and iterating with an incredible opportunity for clear, asymmetric upside when successful in our mission.

• Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge Time: We offer comprehensive health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, so you can focus on staying healthy and building. We offer 4 weeks of vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day and actively encourage you to take at least 2 weeks off annually to recharge so you can show up and push forward every day.

• Top-of-the Line Equipment & Tools: Everyone is given a new MacBook Pro plus a $500 stipend for peripherals and armed with the best AI tools available to stay at the forefront of agent-driven workflows.

• 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.

Why Join Us?

Keycard is building the fundamental unlock for the next generation of software: enabling truly secure and trusted agentic applications. Under the hood, we’re building a new identity and access control stack to take us from a world of static, user-focused, long-lived roles and credentialing to one of mixed machine & human interaction that is dynamic, contextually-scoped, and short-lived.

By joining as an early employee, you’ll have the opportunity to help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined design, empowerment to own meaningful problems, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact. You’ll collaborate with the founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Auth0, and Heroku.

If you’re energized by tackling complex distributed systems and want to advance both developer productivity and security posture, with a hunger to learn, have an impact, and move quickly with determination we’d love to explore how you can help us shape the future of software.