Staff Software Engineer — Identity & Access Management

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer — Identity & Access Management based in Canada.

This role sits at the core of a high-scale identity platform responsible for authentication, authorization, and session management across complex distributed systems. You will act as a technical authority for IAM architecture, shaping how secure access is designed and operated across products used at global scale. The position requires deep expertise in identity protocols such as OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, along with the ability to make high-impact architectural decisions that influence multiple engineering teams. You will work closely with security, product, and infrastructure stakeholders to ensure systems are both compliant and resilient. This is a highly autonomous individual contributor role where your technical direction directly shapes platform reliability and security. You will also serve as a key escalation point for production incidents and contribute to engineering standards across the organization.

• Own the end-to-end architecture and strategy of the Identity & Access Management platform, including authentication, authorization, and session management at scale.
• Design, evolve, and maintain secure identity protocols such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, including token lifecycle, flows, and session handling.
• Drive cross-functional technical decisions across engineering and security teams, ensuring alignment on architecture, scalability, and security trade-offs.
• Identify systemic risks, performance bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities, and lead proactive initiatives to resolve them before production impact.
• Define engineering standards, review critical designs and implementations, and improve team velocity through documentation, tooling, and mentorship.
• Collaborate with product, security, and infrastructure stakeholders to translate business and compliance requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Act as the primary escalation point for complex IAM-related production incidents and ensure timely resolution and post-incident learning.

Requirements:

• Strong expertise in Identity & Security systems, including deep knowledge of OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect flows such as authorization code with PKCE, client credentials, and token refresh strategies.
• Solid understanding of web security fundamentals, including CSRF, XSS, secure cookies, TLS, session management, and secure token storage.
• Proven experience designing, building, or operating production-grade IAM or authentication systems at scale.
• Strong backend engineering experience, ideally with Go (Golang), including concurrency, performance optimization, and idiomatic design patterns.
• Experience with distributed systems and their trade-offs, including consistency, availability, and failure handling.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimization, and large-scale migrations.
• Experience working with Kubernetes environments and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with event-driven systems using tools such as Kafka or NATS.
• Strong technical communication skills, with a proven ability to write RFCs and architecture documents that influence engineering decisions.
• Experience leading cross-team technical initiatives and driving architectural alignment across organizations.
• Nice to have: experience with SAML, SCIM, enterprise SSO, distributed SQL databases, compliance standards (SOC 2, ISO 27001), or gaming industry platforms.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation aligned with senior-level engineering impact.
• Flexible remote work environment across Canada.
• Opportunity to define and own the architecture of a critical global identity platform.
• High-impact individual contributor role with significant technical autonomy.
• Exposure to large-scale distributed systems and modern cloud-native infrastructure.
• Strong engineering culture focused on depth, ownership, and technical excellence.
• Opportunity to influence security standards and identity best practices across multiple products.