Principal Software Engineer - Identity & Access Management
Sezzle
IndiaremotePosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
Principal-Software-EngineerIAMAuthentication-EngineeringBackend-EngineeringPlatform-EngineeringPrincipal-Identity-And-Access-Management-EngineerSenior-Identity-And-Access-Management-EngineerIdentity-And-Access-Management-EngineerPrincipal-Identity-EngineerSenior-Identity-and-Access-Management-ArchitectSenior-Privileged-Access-Management-EngineerIdentity-And-Access-Management-LeadPrincipal-Security-Software-EngineerIdentity-Management-EngineerSoftware EngineerSoftware Developersoftware engineeringSystem DesignSOCDesign PatternsMicroservicesObservabilityPostgreSQLEngineeringdevelopingdesigningsecuritybuildingfintechRESTGolangdesignOAuthMySQLCI/CDAPIsSQLAWSJWTandFulltime
Key highlights
- Salary: $6,000 - $11,000 per month (Gross USD)
- Experience: 12+ years professional software engineering
- Key Benefit: Fully remote
- Notable Requirement: Deployed significant production changes in the last 30 days
- Notable Requirement: Demonstrated AI-forward engineering using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor
- Key Tech: Golang, AWS, and API Gateway/Auth expertise
Role overview
Sezzle is seeking a best-in-class Principal Software Engineer to own and lead the evolution of its authentication and authorization platform. The role focuses on building a purpose-built API auth gateway and a clean set of identity and access management services to redefine the shopping journey through secure, scalable, and invisible auth capabilities. In this backend-focused role, the engineer will drive the technical vision, architecture, and migration strategy, partnering with Product, Security, and Support stakeholders while mentoring teammates and setting patterns for AI-assisted development on security-sensitive systems.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical vision and roadmap for Sezzle’s authentication and authorization platform, including a dedicated API auth gateway and supporting identity services.
- Architect, design, and build scalable, highly-available auth services and gateway components primarily in Golang, leveraging AWS, RDS (MySQL/Postgres), and modern distributed patterns.
- Design and lead phased, zero-downtime migrations of auth traffic and functionality, with clear rollback and safety mechanisms at every step.
- Establish and evolve authentication and authorization standards across the platform: OAuth2/OIDC flows, token strategy (JWT, opaque, refresh), service-to-service auth (mTLS, workload identity), and fine-grained authorization models (RBAC/ABAC/policy engines).
- Drive consistency and scalability across a distributed microservices architecture while maintaining the performance, reliability, and latency budgets expected of an edge gateway.
- Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure the new platform meets fintech-grade security and regulatory requirements, and champion secure-by-default patterns across engineering.
- Establish and evolve engineering best practices for observability, security, and CI/CD across teams, with particular rigor on the auth-critical path.
- Participate in the on-call rotation for the services you own, and help lead incident response and postmortems on the auth-critical path.
- Mentor engineers and champion a culture of learning, innovation, and operational excellence.
- Collaborate cross-functionally to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and deliver results that matter.
Requirements
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant backend experience.
- Deployed significant changes to a production application in the past 30 days.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in authentication and authorization systems: OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT and session-based auth, token lifecycle management, and modern authorization patterns (RBAC, ABAC, policy-as-code).
- Experience designing, building, or operating an API gateway or auth proxy at scale: whether a commercial/open-source gateway (e.g., Kong, Envoy, AWS API Gateway, Traefik) or an in-house edge service.
- Proven track record leading a large-scale service extraction or migration: decomposing a monolith or large legacy service into well-bounded services with zero or minimal customer impact.
- Strong proficiency in Golang, with experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs.
- Expertise with SQL-based RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and experience optimizing schema and queries for performance at scale.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems design patterns (e.g., transactional outbox, event-driven architecture, queues) and the specific challenges of high-throughput, low-latency edge services.
- Demonstrated ability to bring new ideas forward, influence decisions, and lead complex technical initiatives across many teams.
- Demonstrated AI-forward engineering: you actively use AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or custom LLM integrations) in your development work today, have opinions grounded in practice about where it helps and where it doesn't, and help teammates adopt AI-assisted workflows.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a similar technical field (required).
Nice to have
- Experience with identity platforms and standards implementations (e.g., Keycloak, Auth0, Okta, Ory, or in-house IdPs), and familiarity with fine-grained authorization approaches (policy-as-code, relationship-based access control) as we centralize authorization over time.
- Experience with service mesh and edge technologies (Envoy, Istio, mTLS, rate limiting, WAF integration).
- Familiarity with threat modeling, secure design review, and common auth attack vectors (token theft, replay, CSRF, session fixation, privilege escalation).
- Proficiency in observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic), especially for latency-sensitive edge services.
- Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, mainly AWS Aurora RDS, both MySQL and Postgres.
- Experience in fintech, payments, BNPL, or consumer lending - familiarity with financial compliance (PCI-DSS, SOC 2), credit decisioning, or transaction processing systems.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and containerized microservices (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Track record of shipping commercial APIs and platform infrastructure in high-growth environments.
- Proven leadership in guiding technical direction, improving system reliability, and scaling engineering organizations.
Benefits
- Fully remote role
- Competitive compensation
- No relocation or commute
Additional details
- Salary range: $6,000-$11,000 per month (Gross in USD), negotiable based on location, skills, and experience level.
- Technology Stack: Languages (Golang, Typescript, Python), Frontend (Typescript - React and React Native), Backend (Golang), Database (MySQL, Postgres, Elasticsearch), DevOps & Cloud (AWS, Kubernetes), Version Control (Git), CI/CD (Gitlab), Testing (Developer and AI-driven, focus on automated end-to-end, integration, and unit tests).
- Open Source approach: Focused on using open source and building in-house before buying.
- Cultural values: Relentlessly high standards, not bound by convention, need for action/calculated risk-taking, earning trust, backbone (disagree then commit), and delivering results.
- Employment type: full-time
- Originally posted on Himalayas