Staff Software Engineer - Authentication

The opportunity

Pindrop’s Authentication team builds real-time systems that enterprise customers rely on to verify identity at scale. We’re hiring a Staff engineer who is production-first and comfortable owning outcomes end to end.

This role is for someone who can operate distributed systems under real-world load and failure, and who can run model lifecycle changes with the same rigor as service changes. Production MLOps is a strong want: you should be able to make training and inference workflows reproducible, versioned, gated, monitored, and rollbackable.

You’ll own a core area over time, lead cross-team changes that stick, and leave the platform measurably more reliable and easier to operate than you found it.

What you’ll do 

• Own one or more core authentication domains end-to-end across design, implementation, migrations, deprecations, and longer-term technical direction.
• Design and operate real-time distributed authentication services as cloud-native, containerized microservices with explicit behavior under load, partial failure, and degraded dependencies.
• Take full operational ownership, including on-call that covers nights and weekends, after-hours releases, and incident response, postmortems, and lasting fixes.
• Define and execute safe change strategies for auth and model releases through staged rollouts, production validation, clear rollback criteria, and rehearsed playbooks.
• Work with research and ML teams to ship models into auth products and to use language-model based tools where they measurably improve incident handling, log and metric analysis, runbooks, or policy and rules workflows.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives that standardize auth APIs and policies, simplify ML-powered decision paths, reduce operational and integration overhead across engineering, product, research, and customer-facing teams, and back those initiatives with empirical evidence tied to clear business outcomes from design through adoption.

Who you are

• You are a production-first engineer and are comfortable being accountable for critical auth paths, including outages, hard tradeoffs, and customer-facing decisions.
• You think in systems and prefer simple, well-bounded services with clear contracts, SLOs, and explicit failure modes.
• You have a track record of leading multi-team work to completion, aligning stakeholders, unblocking decisions, and staying through cleanup and follow-on improvements.
• You can sit with research and product peers, frame ambiguous auth problems, define measurable outcomes and constraints, and use production metrics, experiment results, and incident patterns to choose work and argue for investments.
• You raise the bar for people around you through clear reviews, mentoring, and by turning one-off fixes into patterns others follow.

Your skill-set

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Significant experience designing and operating latency-sensitive backend APIs or services at scale in domains such as authentication, payments, or risk.
• Hands-on production MLOps experience with reproducible training, data and model versioning, promotion gates, online monitoring tied to business outcomes, and rollback for regressions.
• Experience using large language model-based tooling (AI-augmented design and development using eg: Claude Code or Codex) or similar techniques in production or internal workflows such as incident and log summarization, runbook and documentation assistance, or structured decision support, with attention to evaluation, guardrails, and failure modes.
• Strong operational instincts, including ownership of on-call for critical services, leading incidents, and turning runbook, alert, and SLO work into durable reliability patterns rather than one-off fixes.
• Strong programming and debugging skills in at least one modern backend language; Go and Python are common in our stack, and you are comfortable designing and debugging cloud-native, containerized, and asynchronously connected services using queues, streams, or workflows.
• Familiarity with identity, security, or fraud detection domains is a plus but not required.

What’s in it for you

As a Pindropper, you join a rapidly growing company making technology more human with the power of voice. You will work alongside some of the best and brightest. We’re a passionate group committed to excellence - but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying the journey as a team with chess and poker tournaments, catered lunches and happy hours, wellness programming, and more. Because we take our jobs seriously, we add in time for rest with Unlimited PTO.

Within 30 days, you’ll 

• Complete onboarding and attend New Employee Orientation sessions with other new Pindroppers.
• Ramp up on the development process.
• Understand the product architecture and system design.
• Build working relationships with others on the team.
• Participate in grooming and planning meetings.
• Pick up a small bug fix or code implementation or testing task and ship it.
• Write a short plan for a loosely defined problem that covers scope, risks, sequencing, and success criteria before asking for direction.
• Shadow on-call and an after-hours release and propose one concrete improvement to alerts or runbooks.

Within 60 days, you’ll 

• Start working on a larger project or feature.
• Deliver changes for that project through the full SDL.
• Contribute meaningfully in team ceremonies and technical discussions.
• Lead design for a cross-service slice, including interface or data contract and failure modes, and run the technical portion of the review with affected partners.
• Own one or two reliability areas such as alerts, SLOs, runbooks, or a recurring incident class and start landing measurable improvements.
• Own communication for a cross-team dependency, including a design note and clear async status and risk updates.

Within 90 days, you’ll 

• Deliver a major feature design or implementation.
• Lead an end-to-end cross-team delivery milestone that covers coordination, conflict resolution, and rollout and rollback planning with measurable outcomes.
• Drive part of the task breakdown in grooming and planning meetings.
• Be able to pick up any tasks coming out of planning with minimal hand-holding.
• Drive one shared pattern or standard that others follow by default and ensure adoption beyond your immediate work.
• Produce a short tech priorities proposal backed by production data and influence near-term roadmap tradeoffs.
• Teach us something new.

What we offer

As a part of Pindrop, you’ll have a direct impact on our growing list of products and the future of security in the voice-driven economy. We hire great people and take care of them. Here’s a snapshot of the benefits we offer:

• Competitive compensation, including equity for all employees
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Generous health and welfare plans to choose from - including one employer-paid “employee-only” plan!
• Best-in-class Health Savings Account (HSA) employer contribution
• Affordable vision and dental plans for you and your family
• Employer-provided life and disability coverage with additional supplemental options
• Paid Parental Leave - Equal for all parents, including birth, adoptive & foster parents
• One year of diaper delivery for your newest addition to the family! It’s our way of welcoming new Pindroplets to the family!
• Identity protection through Norton LifeLock
• Recurring monthly Phone and Internet allowance
• One-time home office allowance
• Remote first environment – meaning you have flexibility in your day!
• Company holidays
• Annual professional development and learning benefit
• Pick your own Apple MacBook Pro
• Retirement plan with competitive 401(k) match
• Wellness Program including Employee Assistance Program, 24/7 Telemedicine