Backend Engineer, Identity

Job Description

We’re seeking a skilled and diligent full-time Software Engineer to join our growing team. You will work as part of the engineering team to:

• Develop the Tailscale product, contributing to both open source client code and related backend services
• Take ownership of the entire product lifecycle, from writing code to product ideation and strategic decision-making
• Work closely with UX/UI designers and product managers to shape features
• Bring a special focus to building features related to identity and access management

Because we’re an early-stage and fully remote company, we’re looking for a strongly motivated individual who can help move the product forward at crucial intersections of the technology and organization: in this case, the intersection of our backend platform and its various identity, authorization, and authentication needs. The ability to think on your feet, collaborate with highly technical teams, and comfort working asynchronously are essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Work as part of a team of engineers to design, build, test, and document core software components
• Develop product features in areas that include our control plane, platform, and identity services
• Develop features that support a broad range of sign-on functionality, such as SSO, OAuth2, SAML, and WebAuthn
• Develop and maintain SCIM style capabilities to synchronize users, groups and other attributes from IdPs
• Exhibit ownership over the running services that comprise Tailscale’s product by building for observability, participating in incident response, and fielding customer support escalations
• Analyze and improve efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources
• Bring a security-first mindset to both design and implementation
• This role requires participation in our on-call rotation every x weeks, to triage and mitigate incidents.

What We Are Looking For

• Familiarity with authentication/authorization protocols, standards and frameworks such as OAuth2, OIDC, SSO, and SAML. Familiarity with SCIM is a plus.
• Experience with distributed systems and building observable, secure, scalable, and resilient services
• Most of the non-front-end portions of the system are developed in the Go programming language. Experience with Go is a plus.
• Experience with one or more SQL databases
• Ability to give and process constructive feedback, as well as work independently
• Flexibility to adjust to the dynamic nature of a startup
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Familiarity with networks (IP addressing, routing, etc.) is a plus