Principal Engineer - Customer Identity Access Management; CIAM

Position: Principal Engineer - Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM)
Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly's edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers' applications as close to their end-users as possible - at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development.

Fastly's customers include many of the world's most prominent companies, including Git Hub, Yelp, Paramount, and Jet Blue.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Posting Open Date:
May 12, 2026

Anticipated Posting Close Date*:
May 30, 2026

* Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

Principal Software Engineer - Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM)

Join our dynamic Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) team as a Principal Software Engineer and play a pivotal role in building cutting-edge solutions that centralize and simplify how organizations manage user identities and profile data. Our CIAM team is committed to empowering customers with control over user access by providing advanced access control mechanisms, innovative authentication methods, progressive profiling, and a unified identity experience.

We are looking for passionate, highly skilled software engineers to join our team and be an integral part of our mission. If you're eager to make a significant impact and contribute to the growth of a thriving CIAM ecosystem, we would love to have you on board. Let's build something remarkable together!

What You'll Do

* Lead the technical direction, architecture, and evolution of Fastly's CIAM systems and services.

* Design and build secure, scalable solutions for authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, and related platform capabilities.

* Partner with engineering, product, and security teams to define roadmaps, align priorities, and address technical risks early.

* Drive adoption of modern, standards-based identity patterns and best practices across teams and systems.

* Improve the reliability, security, and maintainability of identity-related services through strong architectural decisions and operational rigor.

* Mentor engineers across the organization, helping raise the quality of technical design, implementation, and collaboration.

* Contribute to an inclusive engineering culture grounded in curiosity, pragmatism, and continuous improvement.

* Participate in on-call support rotation as needed.

What We're Looking For

* Significant experience designing and operating authentication and authorization systems in production environments. Most Principals at Fastly have at least 10 years of related experience.

* Deep understanding of identity and access standards and technologies such as OIDC, OAuth, SAML, SCIM, JWT, and SSO.

* Experience with service-to-service authentication and secure communication patterns in distributed systems.

* Strong background in software architecture and system design, especially in areas of scalability, performance, reliability, and security.

* Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple teams and influence engineering direction at senior levels.

* Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation and align diverse stakeholders.

* Track record of mentoring and growing other engineers, both within your domain of expertise and more broadly across engineering.

Preferred Qualifications

* Experience with Keycloak

* Production experience implementing Role and Attribute-based Access control systems

* Experience with Go, Java, or Ruby

Work Hours:

This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as needed for on call support

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

The preferred hybrid locations for this position are:

San Francisco, CA

Denver, CO

New York, NY

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.

We are also willing to consider highly qualified remote candidates in the United States.

This position will require travel as required by your manager.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary

The estimated salary range for this position is $246,550 to $295,000. Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly's equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your…