Sr Backend Engineer, Identity & Access Management

About the Job: Software powers the world, and LaunchDarkly empowers teams to deliver and control it safely. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Identity & Access Management team, you will own the systems every customer touches before they touch anything else: SAML and OAuth2 single sign-on, SCIM user and team provisioning, login and session management, multi-factor authentication, and the API key and token infrastructure that authenticates every request to our platform. When authentication is wrong, customers cannot get in at all — or the wrong person gets in. Security and availability here are commitments to our customers, not nice-to-haves. You and your team will make this stack operable and enterprise-ready. Technologies include Go, TypeScript, CockroachDB, Redis, AWS, and Terraform. Exact tool match matters far less than deep backend judgment and a track record of safely changing systems that are not allowed to be wrong. Responsibilities: Own LaunchDarkly’s authentication surface end to end — single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, login and session flows, multi-factor authentication, and API key and token authentication. Build the enterprise identity capabilities our largest customers require: additional identity-provider integrations, support for multiple IdPs per account, and MFA enforcement by default. Make the stack operable: SLOs, monitoring for certificate expiry and provisioning failures, actionable alerting, runbooks, and a sustainable on-call. Partner with Product Security on threat modeling, audit logging, and compliance requirements including SOC 2 and FedRAMP. Set the technical direction for identity at LaunchDarkly, and raise the bar for the engineers around you through design review and mentorship. Qualifications: 6+ years of professional software-engineering experience, with significant work on complex backend applications. Experience building or operating production authentication and identity systems. A track record on systems where correctness and availability are non-negotiable, and the habits that come with it: backward-compatible change, staged rollouts, and safe cutovers. Proficiency in at least one backend language (Go, Rust, Python, etc.) and familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), plus strong production ownership including on-call. Bonus Protocol depth in SAML , OIDC /OAuth2, or SCIM , and integration experience with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, OneLogin, or Ping. MFA /WebAuthn, RBAC and authorization policy engines, or audit logging at multi-tenant scale. Engineering under compliance regimes such as SOC 2 or FedRAMP. Pay: Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 5: Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $191,800 - $263,670** Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $172,600 - $237,270** Zone 3: All other US locations - $163,000 - $224,070** LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location. *Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas. **Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary. About LaunchDarkly: Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gr…