Software Engineer, Agent Auth

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As an engineer on the [ Agent Auth and Identity ] team, you'll help answer those questions. You'll build the systems that let agents and people authenticate, delegate access, and act safely across Vercel and the services our customers connect to. This is foundational work: identity and authorization sit underneath everything we ship, and getting them right for agents will shape how modern software gets built.

What it asks for · 7

• [3+] years of experience designing, building, and operating backend systems in production at scale.
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript, or a comparable backend language and the willingness to work primarily in TypeScript.
• A track record of end-to-end ownership, from design and implementation through to long-term operation.
• Ability to reason about architectural tradeoffs, balancing long-term vision with pragmatic delivery.
• Strong cross-team collaboration skills and the ability to drive alignment toward shared goals.
• Have experience with delegated authorization, workload identity, service-to-service auth, or machine credentials.
• Have experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).

Also a plus

• Have built or operated identity providers, auth platforms, or access-control systems used by other developers.
• Have experience with delegated authorization, workload identity, service-to-service auth, or machine credentials.
• Have worked on LLM-powered agents, tool calling, or protocols like MCP.
• Have experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Are familiar with React or Next.js.
• Have contributed to open-source projects or standards bodies.

What the job covers

• Design, build, and operate the identity, authentication, and authorization systems that power Vercel and our Customers for both people and agents.
• Shape how agents prove who they are, act on behalf of users and teams, and receive scoped, time-bound, auditable access.
• Build secure, scalable APIs, services, and SDKs that make auth simple for developers and their agents to adopt.
• Work with modern and emerging standards (such as OAuth 2.x, OIDC, and agent-focused protocols) and help influence where they go next.
• Lead projects end-to-end: identify opportunities, set technical direction, and deliver improvements in security, reliability, and developer experience.
• Partner closely with product, security, and platform teams across Vercel to make identity a strength of every product we ship.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, taking responsibility for the reliability of critical systems.
• Contribute to open source and the broader community conversation on agent identity and trust.
• Write clean, efficient, tested, and well-documented code that others can build upon confidently.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• agents11×
• identity8×
• systems6×
• auth5×
• experience5×
• authorization4×
• build4×
• design4×
• developer4×
• answer3×
• apis3×
• code3×
• end-to-end3×
• people3×
• security3×
• status3×

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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