Principal Engineer – Authentication & Authorization; Hybrid

Position: Principal Engineer – Authentication & Authorization (Hybrid)
As a global leader in cybersecurity, Crowd Strike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily.

Our customers span all industries, and they count on Crowd Strike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. Crowd Strikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation.

We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented Crowd Strikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters?

The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

About the Role:

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to own and drive the technical strategy for Crowd Strike's Authentication Platform. You will be the technical authority defining the architecture and long-term vision for identity and access management systems that secure thousands of enterprise customers globally.

The Auth Platform team is responsible for both internal and external AuthN and AuthZ. The team is a very critical part of Crowd Strike's cloud platform, frequently collaborating with many product groups across the organization. The team builds and extends services that are capable of making 1+ trillion decisions per day — making reliability, scale, and security non-negotiable.

PLEASE NOTE:

This role is hybrid, requiring 2-3 days per week on-site at one of the posted locations.

What You'll Do:

Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for the Auth Platform Architect and evolve our multi-tenant identity infrastructure supporting MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider) models — including hierarchical tenancy, delegated administration, cross-tenant access patterns, and fine-grained access controls

Design and scale high-volume authentication systems and extremely high-volume authorization systems capable of handling millions of AuthN and trillions of AuthZ decisions with ultra-low latency and 99.999% (5 nines) availability

Lead cross-region AuthN/AuthZ architecture ensuring consistent, secure, and performant identity operations across global deployments

Drive the vision for next-generation authentication systems — including passwordless, continuous authentication, and AI-driven adaptive access controls

Lead the design of fine-grained access controls including ABAC, ReBAC, and policy engine frameworks

Define standards for OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, FIDO2/Web Authn, and token lifecycle management

Drive Zero Trust and adaptive authentication initiatives

Mentor senior engineers and elevate the technical bar across the organization

Partner with Product, Security, and Engineering teams to align on priorities and deliver outcomes

What You'll Need:15+ years of software engineering experience with 6+ years in identity/auth systems

Deep expertise in multi-tenant SaaS architecture including MSSP or hierarchical tenancy models with fine-grained access controls at scale

Proven experience building and operating high-volume authentication and extremely high-volume authorization systems — handling millions of AuthN and trillions of…