Systems 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.

The Role

We're hiring a Systems Engineer to help design, build, and operate Keycard's core systems that are the foundation of our envisioned global identity network. This hands-on role has direct impact on how we build our technology, the product and experiences we can offer developers, and the ultimate outcome of the company. You'll collaborate closely with the founders and other early employees to move quickly and build the future of identity for AI systems.

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 reinventing machine identity and access controls for the AI era.

→ Build Reliable, Pragmatic Systems: Build the key systems and product experiences that enable developers to build truly trusted AI systems by unlocking dynamic access controls for machine-to-machine communication with strong security and reliability guarantees.

→ Be Hands On: Take ownership of projects from start to finish. Work across our stack—deploying infrastructure, building core systems, and developing our ecosystem. Whether you're creating new systems from scratch or refining existing ones, you'll work with the team to elevate our technology and build the future of AI infrastructure everywhere you go.

→ Mentor, Learn & Grow: Help your teammates grow by sharing your experiences and leading through hands-on work—crafting code, shipping new components, and contributing through code review & design sessions. Learn from those around you and be challenged every day by your work in a positive learning-focused environment.

→ Shape Engineering Culture: Have a seat at the table to build an engineering culture that values collaboration, iterative delivery, and excellent technology by leading by example—recognizing that culture is what you do, not what you say.

What We're Looking For

→ Versatile Experience: 5+ years of building scalable, reliable distributed systems with experience 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 contribute through change and manage ambiguity, deliver consistently by balancing long-term vision and short-term needs, and most importantly, someone who is excited by being empowered with autonomy and the expectation to self-actualize.

→ 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 build the best systems and bring everyone else along with you.

→ Growing Systems Expertise: An engineer with significant expertise in building and operating distributed systems who is excited to build and operate resilient, high-availability systems with pragmatic technology choices.

→ 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 contributing to 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.

→ Experience building API & library design systems with great ergonomics that make it easy for developers to build trusted systems quickly and easily.

→ Experience with public key infrastructure, enterprise key management, or multi-tenant infrastructure. Excited about edge computing 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.