Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity

Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it.

Our Senior Software Engineers lead and mentor engineers, delivering high‑value products for our customers and infrastructure that enables our business to scale. Vanta’s product monitors the security posture for thousands of companies, pulling tens of millions of API calls of data per day, pushing information from hundreds of thousands of laptop agents, and running tests against that data continuously to identify potential security threats.

Our infrastructure and tooling need to stay ahead of exponential growth in our customer base.

The Identity team at Vanta is building the critical foundation that powers our entire security platform as we scale to serve enterprise customers. Our team focuses on two core pillars: authentication systems that provide secure access to our platform, and authorization frameworks that enable fine‑grained permission controls. As we expand upmarket, we're facing interesting challenges that require thoughtful evolution of our identity infrastructure.

In this role, you'll help design composable and extensible systems for complex user data modeling, support our evolution toward policy‑based authorization, and establish clean interface contracts for identity services. You'll tackle complex challenges at the intersection of security, scalability, and user experience, while influencing how multiple engineering teams integrate with our identity platform. Your work will be fundamental to Vanta's success with enterprise customers, where robust identity management is essential to earning trust with sensitive data.

• Lead complex projects with multiple stakeholders and engineers to enable our business and team to scale
• Collaborate with Security to ensure Vanta's platform implements best practices for customer data
• Support design reviews, communicate constraints, and help engineers make the right trade‑offs
• Act as a cultural beacon, setting an example for effective, collaborative engineering and helping mentor junior team members
• Make effective trade‑offs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation
• Drive initiatives to increase operational posture and execution quality across the engineering organization

• Have at least 8 years of industry experience with backend development
• Strong knowledge of authentication protocols (OIDC, SAML) and identity federation concepts (SSO), or authorization frameworks (RBAC, policy‑based access control)
• Experience building platform services that scale across multiple teams
• Strong data modeling skills for systems with complex relationships
• Experience solving distributed systems challenges around performance and security
• Success with complex technical migrations that maintain system stability
• Security‑focused mindset and understanding of enterprise security practices
• Have led technical projects spanning months
• Work well in environments that value decisive action and getting things done
• Experience mentoring and collaborating with other engineers
• Interest in contributing to Vanta's engineering culture as we grow

• Industry‑competitive salary and equity
• 100% covered medical, dental, and vision benefits with dependents coverage
• Pension contribution
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all new parents
• Health & wellness stipend
• Remote workspace stipend
• Flexible work hours and location
• 21 days of PTO and 80 hours of sick leave
• 8 to 11 company paid holidays (dependent on your territory of residence)
• Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company‑wide events!

At Vanta, we are committed to hiring diverse talent of different backgrounds and as such, it is important…