Sr. Software Engineer: Control Plane

About Auth Zed:

We’re pioneering open-source authorization solutions for scaling businesses tackling complex end-user permissions in zero-trust architectures. Our focus is on providing Spice

DB—the most mature open-source permissions database inspired by Google’s Zanzibar system—and building managed services that enable planet-scale production authorization services.

Our strategic approach to capital-raising has empowered us to efficiently utilize our $3.9M seed fund. We’ve developed Spice

DB, now the open source standard in authorization database technology, fortified our reputation as authorization experts, accelerated our open-source community growth, and are scaling revenue with robust enterprise products.

Auth Zed is a fully remote company with employees across the US and Europe. We’re a hardworking group with a software-driven culture; even our sales team understands and loves our technology! We bring integrity to all our interactions, fostering confidence in decision making - trusting and respecting each voice on our team, every day.

• Agency: Everyone should have the capability, freedom, and confidence to bring about changes to our business and product. Organizational processes exist to clearly define our goals, but not restrict how progress is made.

• Collaboration: Success is defined in various dimensions and no single person can be an expert in all of them. Without valuing the opinions of others, finding compromises, and sharing mutual trust and respect, you cannot arrive at the best possible solution.

• Open-mindedness: Without asking questions, testing assumptions, and questioning our pre-existing biases we risk operating within an echo-chamber. We celebrate the representation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds as a catalyst for creating an inclusive work environment that everyone can appreciate.

At Auth Zed, we’re redefining how modern applications think about access control.

Auth Zed Cloud is an Authorization Infrastructure as a Service, designed to power real-time access control for production applications. Authorization decisions sit on the critical path of customer systems, which means correctness, performance, and availability are foundational requirements.

The control plane manages how customer authorization infrastructure is provisioned, secured, configured, and evolved over time.

This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, Kubernetes-native platforms, security-sensitive domains, and billing-critical workflows.

You’ll collaborate closely with frontend engineers, SRE, and Product to ensure Auth Zed Cloud is reliable, secure, and transparent for customers.

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services and APIs that power Auth Zed Cloud’s control plane.

• Build and operate Kubernetes-native systems, including custom operators and controllers, to manage customer environments and infrastructure lifecycle.

• Design durable, idempotent workflows for provisioning, configuration changes, scaling, and deletion.

• Implement and integrate authentication and identity flows (e.g., SSO, SAML, OAuth/OIDC) in a secure, multi-tenant SaaS environment.

• Implement and evolve usage-based billing systems.

• Engineer distributed systems that behave correctly under partial failure, retries, concurrency, and long-running operations.

• Collaborate closely with frontend engineers to design APIs and workflows that result in clear, reliable user experiences.

• Ensure services are observable and operable through structured logging, metrics, and alerts.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues involving orchestration, authentication, or state management.

• Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to incident resolution and post-incident improvements.

• Document APIs, workflows, system behavior, and operational guidelines.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent education, experience, and training in Computer Science or a related field.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in cloud computing (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and Kubernetes.

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes.

• Strong Kubernetes…