Principal Software Engineer – Identity & Access Management

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

📋 Description

• Take charge of the technical vision and roadmap for Sezzle’s authentication and authorization platform, which includes an API authentication gateway and associated identity services.

• Design, architect, and create scalable and highly available authentication services and gateway components primarily using Golang, AWS, RDS, and distributed patterns.

• Lead the design and execution of phased migrations for authentication traffic and functionalities, ensuring zero downtime and incorporating rollback and safety measures.

• Set forth standards for authentication and authorization, encompassing OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, opaque and refresh tokens, mTLS, workload identity, RBAC, ABAC, and policy engines.

• Enhance consistency and scalability across the distributed microservices architecture while upholding performance, reliability, and latency targets.

• Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams to fulfill fintech-grade security and regulatory standards.

• Develop and promote engineering best practices for observability, security, and CI/CD across teams.

• Engage in on-call rotations while leading incident responses and postmortems for the critical authentication path.

• Mentor fellow engineers and foster an environment of learning, innovation, and operational excellence.

• Work collaboratively across functions to transform business objectives into technical roadmaps and achieve results.

• Contribute to the establishment of effective AI tooling practices for security-sensitive systems.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 12 years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong emphasis on backend development.

• Successfully deployed significant updates to a production application within the last month.

• Extensive hands-on knowledge of authentication and authorization systems, including OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT, session-based authentication, token lifecycle management, RBAC, ABAC, and policy-as-code.

• Experience in designing, building, or managing an API gateway or authentication proxy at scale.

• Demonstrated success in leading large-scale service extractions or migrations with zero or minimal impact on customers.

• High proficiency in Golang and experience in building and maintaining RESTful APIs.

• Expertise in SQL-based relational databases, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, with a focus on optimizing schemas and queries for performance.

• Knowledge of distributed systems design patterns, including transactional outbox, event-driven architecture, and queues.

• Capacity to propose ideas, influence decision-making, and spearhead complex initiatives across teams.

• Active engagement with AI tooling such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or custom LLM integrations in current development projects.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline (required).

• Preferred experience with identity platforms and standards implementations, service mesh and edge technologies, threat modeling, observability tools, AWS infrastructure, fintech or payments, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, commercial APIs, and platform infrastructure.

🏝️ Benefits

• Fully remote work.

• No need for relocation or commuting.

• Principal-level scope and ownership.

• Competitive salary.

• Opportunities for career advancement.

• AI-assisted development tools and workflows.

• Collaboration with a global team.