Staff Software Engineer

ABOUT THE TEAM 

Technology is at the core of what we do. The Auth Team at Basis Technologies designs secure, performant, and expressive systems that model programmatic advertising’s complicated real-world organizational hierarchies and resource ownership. The Auth team functions as an enabling platform for all of Basis Engineering; building and owning the authorization primitives, identity infrastructure, and access control policies that every product team depends on. We set the standard for how trust is established and enforced across the platform, for both human users navigating complex agency hierarchies and AI agents operating autonomously within our systems. 

WAYS YOU WILL CONTRIBUTE 

You will be specializing in technical development of our authentication and authorization platform. Other ways you will contribute: 

• Define authorization for our AI-powered agentic workflows and designing how non-human actors authenticate, receive scoped permissions, and operate within the same authorization framework as human users.

• Evolve our identity layer in Auth0 to improve authentication, token issuance, and identity federation. 

• Mature and maintain our Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC) OpenFGA model, which supports all authorization decisions across our infrastructure. 

• Drive large-scale technical projects that depend on multiple teams and systems. Establish and champion best practices and quality standards with the team. 

• Set a positive example and mentor others on how to collaborate in pull requests, demos, and working relationships. Contribute to a culture of learning and high standards of technical achievement. 

• Take ownership over team deliverables, decisions, quality, process, and technical direction. Be accountable for driving projects from ideation through production. 

• Demonstrate a deep understanding of our application’s business domain and stakeholder needs. Use your knowledge to proactively identify risks and blockers during planning discussions, architecture discussions, and RFCs. Ensure feasibility and alignment between business goals and technical implementation for large-scale projects. 

• Embody Basis’ core principles while fostering a positive culture within the team. Actively promote Basis in the community. 

• Minimum of 8 years of professional software experience, with significant depth in identity, authentication, or authorization systems. 

• Deep understanding of OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (token flows, JWKS validation, scopes, audience restrictions, etc). 

• Hands-on experience with ReBAC systems (OpenFGA, Zanzibar, SpiceDB), including modeling authorization schemas, writing and testing tuple-based policies, and reasoning about permission evaluation performance. 

• Experience with Auth0 or comparable identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, Keycloak). 

• Strong proficiency in backend languages such as Java, Ruby, or Python as well as web frameworks such as Spring Boot, Rails, or Django. 

• Fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.) as a core part of the development workflow — for code generation, debugging, exploration of unfamiliar codebases, and documentation — paired with strong judgment for evaluating, refining, and taking full ownership of AI-generated output. 

• Thoughtful approach to collaboration, design, and decision-making that prioritizes equity, access, and continuous learning. 

• Commitment to creating inclusive, respectful environments where all voices are valued and supported. 

• Ruby, JavaScript, Java 

• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes 

• PostgreSQL, Redis 

• Rails, Node.js, React, RabbitMQ, Sidekiq