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AuthZed is a Series A company building authorization infrastructure and SpiceDB, an open-source permissions database inspired by Google Zanzibar. The company serves enterprise customers globally and maintains a fully remote, distributed team across the US, Canada, and Europe.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work on SpiceDB and the broader AuthZed open-source ecosystem, tackling complex problems at the intersection of distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and fine-grained authorization. Your responsibilities include:
- Designing, implementing, testing, and releasing features across SpiceDB and other open-source AuthZed projects
- Driving best practices in software development, testing, and CI/CD to ensure platform robustness and scalability
- Taking end-to-end ownership of your work from development through production operations, including participation in on-call rotation
- Troubleshooting correctness, stability, and performance issues in complex distributed systems, particularly around query planning and execution
- Collaborating with users and contributors in the open-source community, reviewing contributions, and evolving APIs
- Identifying opportunities to optimize processes and elevate team performance
- Working closely with other engineers, product, and support teams
- Representing AuthZed as a thought leader through technical documentation, blogs, and talks
The company emphasizes agency, collaboration, and open-mindedness. You'll operate in an agile startup environment where your technical leadership directly influences strategic direction. AuthZed values transparent communication, psychological safety, and professional well-being, with structured mentorship and objective recognition of achievement.
Benefits include competitive pay, early-stage stock options, comprehensive healthcare and insurance (for US team members), fully remote work with flexible hours, and twice-yearly in-person offsites.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
- 5+ years of programming experience in languages such as Golang, Python, or Java (Go experience is a plus)
- Strong systems engineering background (distributed systems, operating systems, databases)
- Experience building and debugging complex production systems where correctness, reliability, and performance are critical
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and managing distributed databases in cloud-native environments
- Proficiency with modern software development practices and tools (CI/CD, Docker, Git)
- Excellent communication skills; ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Proven ability to thrive in remote-first, cross-time-zone teams
DESIRABLE:
- Experience building Kubernetes controllers or operators
- Familiarity with database concepts and implementation (compilers, indices, query planning, optimization, materialized views)
- Familiarity with modern authorization systems and access control models
