• You have deep experience building and operating identity, authentication, and authorization systems. You understand OAuth, SCIM, OIDC, mTLS, and related primitives — and you treat them as products, not just infrastructure.
• Strong distributed systems instincts. You design for security, multi-tenancy, and reliability, with clear thinking about consensus, transactionality, and extensible data models.
• You're a programmer first — fluent in Go, Rust, or similar languages, comfortable moving across the stack from core systems and infrastructure to SDKs and APIs.
• You thrive in 0→1 environments. You make hard trade-offs to ship today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, and you use iteration to accelerate the learning loop.
• You lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow. You communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.
• STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO HAVE
• Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and strong opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them.
• Experience designing extensible systems — WASM, plugin frameworks, dynamic policy engines — so developers and organizations can tailor platforms to their needs.
• A track record of designing APIs, SDKs, or libraries with great ergonomics that other developers depend on.
• Contributions to open source identity, security, or CNCF projects, or experience building and shaping developer ecosystems.