Staff Software Engineer

Essential Job Duties

Our ideal Staff Software Engineer, Permissions will be the technical authority for BambooHR's next-generation permission service — designing and building the system that securely controls what every user, token, and agent can do across our platform. You'll own the architecture of a greenfield permissions service from the ground up, define AuthN/AuthZ patterns for 180+ product domains, and be the connective tissue between the Token Titans team and the engineering organization that depends on the work you ship. If you get energy from solving hard identity and access problems at scale — and doing it in a way that other engineers actually want to build on — this role is for you.

You will:

• Drive the architecture and delivery of a new permission service — from first design doc to production, including data model, policy evaluation engine, enforcement APIs, and token contract
• Define BambooHR's AuthN/AuthZ standards — the patterns for authentication flows, token issuance, scoped authorization, and role/attribute-based access control that product teams rely on
• Design the API contract for the permission service: how callers request access decisions, how policies are defined, and how enforcement is decoupled from individual product domains
• Drive token strategy — JWT issuance, rotation, scoping, revocation, and the relationship between tokens and permissions across both human and machine (API/agent) callers
• Partner with product and platform teams to translate domain-specific access control requirements into reusable permission primitives that scale across the organization
• Lead architectural reviews for features with AuthN/AuthZ implications; catch design debt before it ships
• Collaborate with Security and Compliance to ensure the permission service meets audit, least-privilege, and zero-trust requirements
• Set the technical bar for the Token Titans team: mentor engineers, lead RFCs, and ensure implementation quality matches architectural intent

What You Need to Get the Job Done

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years operating at Staff or Principal level
• Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML), authorization models (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC), and token lifecycle management (JWTs, opaque tokens, refresh/rotation strategies)
• Demonstrated experience designing and building AuthN/AuthZ systems at scale — not just integrating with them, but owning the architecture that others build on
• Strong instincts for policy-as-code, permission modeling, and how to express complex access rules as a clean, evolvable data model
• Experience designing or reviewing OpenAPI specifications, event-driven architectures, and cross-service communication patterns in a service-oriented or microservice environment
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals; comfort working in a PHP monolith with modern architectural patterns
• Proven ability to drive org-wide architectural decisions — writing RFCs, leading review