Senior Software Engineer I - Identity & Access Management

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here. We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer I to join our Customer Trust & Engineering team working on Identity and Access Management. IAM is the bedrock of trust at DigitalOcean; our services sit in the critical path of every request, authorizing billions of transactions per second with single-digit millisecond latency.

In this role, you will own significant technical workstreams within our Identity platform; not just implementing features, but shaping how they are designed, tested, and operated. You will go deep on identity protocols, distributed systems challenges, and security engineering, and you will actively raise the technical quality of the team around you. If you are a strong engineer who wants to combine technical depth with growing cross-team influence, this is the team for you.

• Own Technical Workstreams: Design and develop high-availability, low-latency authentication and authorization services in Go, taking end-to-end ownership from design through production operation.

• Drive Identity Protocol Work: Lead the implementation of OIDC and SAML integrations, enabling seamless federated Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise customers and strategic global partners owning the design decisions, not just the implementation.

• Advance AuthZ Capabilities: Extend our Policy Engine (Rego/OPA) to support advanced resource-level permissions, dynamic scoping, and network-aware access conditions translating product requirements into robust, scalable policy logic.

• Build for AI Workloads: Contribute to IAM foundations for emerging AI/ML platforms, designing secure token exchange patterns and identity context propagation for agentic workflows.

• Evolve Identity Models: Design and scale multi-tenant data models to manage complex hierarchical structures (users, teams, organizations, and resource boundaries) that map cleanly to enterprise customer needs.

• Operational Ownership: Drive service reliability improvements from Kubernetes tuning to data pipeline modernization and participate actively in on-call, treating operational excellence as a first-class engineering concern.

• Security First: Proactively identify and remediate complex security vulnerabilities, ensuring auth flows are resilient against credential stuffing, session hijacking, and configuration theft.

• Mentor & Elevate: Mentor junior engineers through code reviews and design feedback, sharing knowledge in distributed systems and identity best practices without needing to formally lead workstreams.

What You’ll Add to DigitalOcean

• Experience: 4–7 years of software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years focused on Identity (AuthN/AuthZ), Security Products, or high-scale Distributed Systems.

• Language Proficiency: Strong proficiency in Go and solid understanding of gRPC microservices architecture.

• Identity Knowledge: Working knowledge of identity protocols (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML) and access control models (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC); able to reason about