Software Engineer (Agent Auth)

Location: Remote in the US; San Francisco, US

Base pay: $196,000–$294,000 annually. Total compensation may also include benefits, equity-based compensation, and bonus or variable pay.

Company

Vercel builds agentic infrastructure that helps people and software agents ship and run applications with speed, security, and strong developer experience.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate identity, authentication, and authorization systems for people and agents.
• Define how agents authenticate, act on behalf of users and teams, and receive scoped, time-bound, auditable access.
• Build secure, scalable APIs, services, and SDKs for developers and their agents.
• Work with OAuth 2.x, OIDC, and emerging agent-focused protocols, helping influence their direction.
• Own projects end-to-end, drive technical direction, and improve security, reliability, and developer experience.
• Collaborate with product, security, and platform teams; participate in on-call and contribute to open source.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating backend systems in production at scale.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript or a comparable backend language, with willingness to work primarily in TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of authentication and authorization, including sessions, tokens, OAuth/OIDC flows, permission models, and secrets management.
• Security-minded engineering approach covering threat models, least privilege, and failure modes.
• End-to-end ownership from design and implementation through long-term operation.
• Ability to evaluate architectural trade-offs and balance long-term vision with pragmatic delivery.
• Strong cross-team collaboration and ability to drive alignment toward shared goals.
• Curiosity and comfort working in a fast-moving space without established playbooks.

Nice to have

• Experience building or operating identity providers, authentication platforms, or access-control systems for developers.
• Experience with delegated authorization, workload identity, service-to-service authentication, or machine credentials.
• Experience with LLM-powered agents, tool calling, or protocols such as MCP.
• Experience with AWS and Terraform.
• Familiarity with React or Next.js.
• Open-source or standards-body contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work in the US, with a work-from-home budget and required equipment provided.
• Inclusive healthcare package and flexible time off.
• Mentorship and participation in events supporting professional growth and networking.
• Compensation may include equity and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program.