Software Engineer - Identity & Authorization

About Baseten
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, Open Evidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital.

Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

About Baseten
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, Open Evidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital.

Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE
The largest, most demanding enterprises run on Baseten, and they bring exacting requirements for how people, services, and agents access the platform. This is the founding role for our identity and authorization team within enterprise engineering. You'll own the identity and access layer of the Baseten platform: the authorization model, credential systems, and admin experiences that enterprise IT teams use to govern access for organizations like Harvey, Hub Spot, and Notion.

You’ll design and build Baseten’s fine-grained authorization system from the ground up to support the workflows customers depend on today while giving them cleaner, more precise ways to manage access as the platform grows. Authorization at Baseten requires low-latency permission checks at high request volume, consistent contracts and behaviors across the product suite, and strong security guarantees for mission-critical, highly regulated workloads.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES
Recent and upcoming work in this area:

Fine-grained authorization for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads: per-resource permissions at the organization, team, and workload scope to support both common workflows and complex enterprise access policies

Programmatic authentication allowing high-compliance customers to connect service principles securely via short-lived, workload-based credentials

Agent credentials that grant an agent exactly the access it needs for the given task and nothing more

Enterprise identity lifecycle including single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and per-organization session expiry policies

Admin controls for centralized visibility, auditability, and governance over credentials, roles, and access

Responsibilities

Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration.

Design authorization and credential models that support critical user workflows today and can be safely extended as the platform evolves.

Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise security requirements into durable technical solutions.

Establish engineering practices for quality, security, observability, and operational ownership.

Provide technical leadership and mentorship as the team grows.

Requirements

4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems, including hands‑on design and implementation of a product authorization system: per-resource or per-object permissions, relationship‑based access control, a policy engine, or a fine-grained authorization system in the style of Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar.

Demonstrated end‑to‑end ownership: you've…