Senior Backend Engineer (Identity & Authorization)

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, Montreal, New York, Seattle, or Toronto

Salary: $240K–$285K per year, plus equity

Company

Baseten provides AI inference infrastructure and developer tooling for companies deploying machine learning models into production.

What you will do

• Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Design fine-grained authorization and credential models for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads.
• Build low-latency permission checks and consistent access-control behavior for high-volume, multi-tenant systems.
• Develop enterprise identity capabilities including single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, session expiry policies, and administrative controls.
• Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to translate enterprise security requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Establish practices for quality, security, observability, operational ownership, and technical mentorship.

Requirements

• 4–5+ years of experience building production backend systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing product authorization systems using per-resource permissions, relationship-based access control, policy engines, or fine-grained authorization systems such as Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar.
• End-to-end ownership of systems from initial design through production rollout and iteration with users.
• Experience developing and operating scalable multi-tenant systems where authorization checks are in the request path and latency and consistency matter.
• Ability to work across product and application code, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes.

Nice to have

• Experience with Python and Go.
• Production experience operating OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or a similar authorization system.
• Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM protocols.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation with meaningful equity.
• U.S. employees and dependents receive full medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage.
• Flexible PTO and a company-wide winter break.
• Paid parental leave and a fertility and family-building stipend.
• Company-facilitated 401(k) for U.S. employees.
• Exposure to a range of machine learning startups and production AI infrastructure challenges.