Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it. Our Senior Software Engineers lead and mentor engineers, delivering high-value products for our customers and infrastructure that enables our business to scale. Vanta’s product monitors the security posture for thousands of companies, pulling tens of millions of API calls of data per day, pushing information from hundreds of thousands of laptop agents, and running tests against that data continuously to identify potential security threats. Our infrastructure and tooling need to stay ahead of exponential growth in our customer base. As a Senior Software Engineer at Vanta, you’ll be responsible for setting technical direction to provide a strong foundation for our infrastructure to scale with our business. You will also drive complex projects across our technical stack and mentor our talented engineering team. Your past experience will be leveraged to enable and accelerate Vanta’s growth. Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog https://www.vanta.com/all-categories/engineering to learn more about what our team is working on! What you’ll do as a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team at Vanta: As Vanta expands its agentic capabilities across surfaces like MCP, CLI, and the Vanta Agent, the Identity team is at the center of a new set of problems: defining what it means for an agent to act as a user's proxy, enforcing consistent permission checks across every invocation surface, and building an attribution model that makes agent-assisted actions auditable and trustworthy. You'll help design the identity primitives that make autonomous agent behavior safe and governable at scale. You will also: - Lead complex projects with multiple stakeholders and engineers to enable our business and team to scale - Collaborate with Security to ensure Vanta's platform implements best practices for customer data - Support design reviews, communicate constraints, and help engineers make the right trade-offs - Act as a cultural beacon, setting an example for effective, collaborative engineering and helping mentor junior team members - Make effective tradeoffs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation - Drive initiatives to increase operational posture and execution quality across the engineering organization How to be successful in this role: - Have at least 8 years of industry experience with backend development - Strong knowledge of authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML) and identity federation concepts (SSO), or authorization frameworks (RBAC, policy-based access control) - Experience building platform services that scale across multiple teams - Strong data modeling skills for systems with complex relationships - Experience solving distributed systems challenges around performance and security - Success with complex technical migrations that maintain system stability - Security-focused mindset and understanding of enterprise security practices - Have led technical projects spanning months - Work well in environments that value decisive action and getting things done - Experience mentoring and collaborating with other engineers - Interest in contributing to Vanta's engineering culture as we grow - Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact What you can expect as a Vanta'n: - Industry-competitive salary and equity - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans - 16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents - Health & wellness stip