Staff Software Engineer - Identity & Access Management

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As a Staff Engineer on IAM, you will lead projects and initiatives to improve the security, reliability, and developer experience of our authentication, authorization, and identity platforms for customers, partners, and internal systems. You will scope and drive projects with clear impact, work cross-functionally with the broader engineering organization, help define the team’s technical quality, and help evolve the identity platform as Brex invests in signed identity propagation, delegated and agent identity, fine-grained authorization, stronger auditability, and enterprise-ready customer authentication experiences.

What it asks for · 7

• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable production backend systems.
• You have experience leading complex projects and mentoring other engineers.
• You have strong API design fundamentals, rigor around testing, code quality, and documentation.
• You understand core IAM concepts such as authentication, authorization, sessions, tokens, MFA, SSO, OAuth, SAML, OIDC, or RBAC.
• You communicate clearly, collaborate well across teams, and are effective in cross-functional technical discussions.
• You care about operational excellence and know how to improve system reliability, reduce toil, and maintain high-quality services over time.
• You have strong product and engineering judgment and can balance security, usability, and developer experience.

Also a plus

• You have worked on identity and access management, authentication, authorization, or audit systems in a production environment.
• You have hands-on experience with Okta, Oso, SSO, SAML, OIDC, OAuth, or WebAuthn.
• You have experience building enterprise-facing admin controls, authorization platforms, delegated access flows, or audit trails.
• You have worked on platform teams that provide shared infrastructure, paved roads, or secure-by-default frameworks for other engineering teams.

What the job covers

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and APIs for authentication, authorization, identity context, and audit-related workflows.
• Lead engineers across the organization on initiatives end to end, from technical design and implementation through rollout, measurement, and operational support.
• Improve login and access experiences across SSO, MFA, step-up authentication, delegated access, and enterprise identity flows.
• Build and extend authorization systems that support custom roles, resource-aware access control, and secure defaults for product teams.
• Lead creation of durable, identity-aware audit trails and attribution for user, service, delegated, and agent-driven actions.
• Partner closely with engineers across Brex to make IAM integrations secure by default and easier to adopt through clear patterns, tooling, and shared libraries.
• Mentor engineers on the team to deliver high-quality code and produce operational improvements that raise the bar for reliability and maintainability across the team’s systems.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• authentication9×
• authorization9×
• experience9×
• systems9×
• access8×
• identity8×
• engineering7×
• platform6×
• engineers5×
• authentication authorization4×
• delegated4×
• end4×
• technical4×
• build3×
• design3×
• flows3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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