Senior Backend Engineer (Identity & Authorization)

Company

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, providing flexible infrastructure and developer tooling to bring cutting-edge models into production.

Location

Must be based in or able to commute to San Francisco, Montreal, New York, or Toronto (Hybrid role).

Salary

Compensation: $240,000 – $285,000 + Equity.

What you will do

• Lead the design and implementation of a fine-grained authorization system from the ground up.
• Develop credential systems and admin experiences for enterprise IT teams to govern access.
• Ensure low-latency permission checks at high request volumes for mission-critical workloads.
• Partner with product and design teams to translate security requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Establish engineering practices for quality, security, and observability across the platform.

Requirements

• 4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems.
• Hands-on experience designing product authorization systems (e.g., Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar).
• Proven track record of end-to-end ownership from design through production rollout.
• Experience operating multi-tenant systems at scale where latency and consistency are critical.
• Comfort working across the full stack, including application code, cloud, and Kubernetes infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Experience with Python and Go.
• Production experience running OpenFGA or SpiceDB.
• Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM protocols.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
• Flexible PTO policy including a company-wide Winter Break.
• Paid parental leave and fertility/family-building stipends.
• Company-facilitated 401(k).
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups and networking opportunities.