Staff Software Engineer, Fine Grained Authorization

We are building project "Sandcastle": a new product for large scale, fine grained authorization (FGA). It uses a globally distributed database and Relationship Based Access control, and is based on Google's Zanzibar paper.

An Authorization service is a critical component. All requests that need to be authorized go through it, so it needs to be reliable and respond with low latency. We are looking for people that excel at designing and implementing highly reliable, performant systems, and enjoy building from scratch. We are going to be building for at least 99.99% reliability and low two digits for p99 latency for reads.

In addition to the challenges of building a world scale distributed system, building from scratch means that: we spend a lot of time talking to customers, generating awareness about the product, writing content and implementing quick starts, SDKs, etc. Think of it as having the breadth and experiences of working at a small startup with the budget and certainty of a late-stage startup.

We are looking for an engineer who enjoys building new products (i.e. going from 0 to 1). These are some of the things we are looking for:

• You are consistently learning about how to make systems more reliable and performant
• You enjoy writing software and running infrastructure
• You are curious and go beyond what says in a Jira ticket
• You want to understand the big picture
• You are comfortable with doing multiple things

You will:

• Design and implement features to make implementing FGA a delightful experience. We'll be doing many things such as working on the core authz engine, implementing connectors to feed data into Sandcastle from other systems (e.g. Postgres, Kafka, Stripe), integrating with Auth0 and Okta and providing an auditing platform that supports log storage, retrieval and streaming.
• Automate infrastructure setup for the service. Today we are building with Terraform, AWS DynamoDB and ECS. We want it to be really easy to set up dedicated clusters with data nodes in specific geographies based on our customer's latency and compliance requirements.
• Tune the latency and reliability of the service. These are some of the things we have in mind in the short term:
• Parallelizing query execution as much as possible, which is a key benefit of Sandcastle
• Automate and create playbooks for region failover scenarios. What happens if the write region goes down? What happens if a read region goes down?
• Implement observability (metrics, logs, tracing), circuit breakers, performance optimizations and many other things
• Work with our customer community to answer their questions in forums, social media, tickets and chat.

You might be a good fit if:

• You enjoy building reliable, performant systems, including developing software and designing and running infrastructure
• You love to build products for developers
• You can learn very quickly. We don't need you to know everything, but being able and willing to learn is key.
• Have t-shaped skills and enjoy using and improving them
• You have a good product sense (i.e. you can connect customer problems with solutions)
• You crave to understand the big picture, as it helps you make better decisions
• You like talking to customers (developers) to learn about their problems and you apply those learnings back to the product.

What you bring:

• 7+ years of experience working on cloud applications
• 10+ years of software development experience
• Great ability to collaborate with others
• Good written and verbal communication skills in English
• Knowledge working with AWS, DynamoDB, and/or Go is a plus
• Experience building authorization systems at scale is a plus

Auth0 makes the internet safer by safeguarding billions of login transactions each month.

Our team is spread across more than 35 countries and we are proud to continually be recognized as a great place to work. Culture is critical to us, and we are transparent about our vision and principles. We practice N+1>N which applies to everything from our people to how we iterate our tech; we believe in one team, one score; and we give a shit about everything we do.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply unless they meet all the job criteria. We aren't looking for someone who ticks every single box on a page; we're looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. If you think you'd be a great fit, then please get in touch to tell us about yourself.

Auth0, recently acquired by Okta, is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Auth0 conducts all employment-related activities without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, citizenship status, genetics, or status as a Vietnam-era special disabled and other covered veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Auth0 participates in E-Verify and will confirm work authorization for candidates residing in the United States.