Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Establish the technical strategy for authentication, authorization, customer identity, and innovative agent identity functionalities.

• Oversee the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Circle’s identity and access platform.

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of backend and frontend engineers.

• Direct technical design efforts, evaluate critical code paths, troubleshoot production issues, engage in incident response, and create prototypes.

• Collaborate with Security, Product, Onboarding, Risk, and product engineering teams.

• Organize competing requests into a coherent roadmap and articulate trade-offs.

• Manage planning, scoping, migrations, cutovers, rollback strategies, and status updates.

• Enhance engineering practices, operational readiness, and dependable platform capabilities.

• Educate the wider organization about how identity functions at Circle.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of three years of experience managing software engineers, including recruitment, performance evaluation, coaching, and developing senior individual contributors.

• Proven experience leading a team through significant migrations, re-platforming, or architectural transformations.

• Extensive hands-on experience in building identity, authentication, authorization, or access-control systems at scale.

• Familiarity with OAuth 2.x and OIDC, SAML and enterprise SSO, session and token design, API credentials, service or workload identity, MFA and passkeys, or policy and entitlement engines.

• Experience in designing systems that are utilized by other teams, demonstrating strong architectural judgment.

• Recent experience in designing, prototyping, reviewing, or deploying production code.

• Practical experience with real-world identity, authentication/authorization security challenges.

• Capability to create usable design documentation and clearly explain complex systems.

• Direct experience with Okta, Auth0, or a similar customer identity platform is particularly advantageous.

• Experience with AI agent identity, delegated authorization, workload identity, service identity, or other non-human identity systems is especially beneficial.

• Experience in building or managing systems where software agents or automated services perform significant actions under defined authority is especially valuable.

• Background in fintech, crypto, payments, or another regulated industry is a plus.

• Familiarity with on-behalf-of token exchange, MCP authorization, SPIFFE/SPIRE, workload identity federation, agent registries, or policy engines like OPA or Cedar is a plus.

• Experience with Java or Kotlin backend systems and modern TypeScript frontend applications is a plus.

• Experience managing a geographically distributed team is a plus.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible work environment.

• Inclusive workplace.

• Interview accommodations and assistance for candidates with disabilities.