---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer at AuthZed'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-authzed-united-states-4z3rh422jx10'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Senior Software Engineer at AuthZed

- **Company:** AuthZed
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/authzed/3bfb826e-1125-4ea4-b5ea-a0dbe776ab18

## Job description

About AuthZed: We are the creators and maintainers of SpiceDB and the authorization infrastructure that companies around the world depend on to keep their engineering teams focused on what matters most - their own product. We are a Series A company, fixing broken access control with products that eliminate complex permission management while delivering enterprise-scale performance and consistent access control. We are a fully remote company with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe. We’re a hardworking and close-knit group with a software-driven culture (yep, even our GTM team understands and loves this technology)! We bring integrity to all our interactions, fostering confidence in decision making - trusting and respecting each voice on our team, every day.

Company Values:

- Agency: Everyone should have the capability, freedom, and confidence to bring about changes to our business and product. Organizational processes exist to clearly define our goals, but not restrict how progress is made.
- Collaboration: Success is defined in various dimensions and no single person can be an expert in all of them. Without valuing the opinions of others, finding compromises, and sharing mutual trust and respect, you cannot arrive at the best possible solution.
- Open-mindedness: Without asking questions, testing assumptions, and questioning our pre-existing biases, we risk operating within an echo-chamber. We celebrate the representation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds as a catalyst for creating an inclusive work environment that everyone can appreciate.

About the Role: At AuthZed, we’re building the infrastructure that makes fine-grained authorization possible at scale. We are the creators of SpiceDB, the open-source permissions database inspired by Google Zanzibar, as well as a growing ecosystem of open-source and commercial products built around it.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll work on SpiceDB and other open-source projects across the AuthZed ecosystem. You’ll tackle challenging problems at the intersection of distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and authorization—from query planning and execution to performance, scalability, reliability, and operability.

Operating in an agile startup environment, your technical leadership and innovation will directly influence our strategic trajectory. You will collaborate with a high-performing engineering team to address complex challenges in distributed systems, cloud architecture, and fine-grained authorization models, delivering scalable solutions to AuthZed’s global enterprise customer base.

AuthZed’s organizational culture is built upon principles of mutual respect, transparent communication, and psychological safety. We empower team members to exercise initiative and pursue well-considered technical strategies while maintaining a firm commitment to professional well-being and operational boundaries. We support professional advancement through structured mentorship and objective recognition of achievement. Our inclusive, highly collaborative workplace leverages diverse perspectives to drive both individual career growth and organizational excellence.

What you’ll own:

- Build SpiceDB and the AuthZed OSS ecosystem: Research, design, implement, test, and release features across SpiceDB and other open-source AuthZed projects.
- Champion of Quality: Drive best practices in software development, testing, and CI/CD to ensure our platform is robust, scalable, and always on the leading edge.
- Embrace the "operate what you build" philosophy, taking end-to-end ownership of your work - from development and deployment to production operations, and participate in on-call rotation.
- Problem Solver: Troubleshoot correctness, stability or performance issues related to statement planning and execution in a complex distributed system.
- Work in the open: Collaborate with users and contributors, review contributions, participate in technical discussions, and help evolve our open-source projects and APIs.
- Continuous Improver: Proactively identify opportunities to optimize processes, streamline operations, and elevate team performance.
- Collaborator and Mentor: Work closely with other engineers, product, and support teams.
- Storyteller: Showcase your work through technical documentation, blogs, and talks, representing AuthZed as a thought leader in the industry.

What you bring:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of experience working in programming languages like Golang, python, Java. Experience with Go is a plus.
- Strong Systems engineering background (e.g. distributed systems, operating systems, databases).
- Experience building and debugging complex production systems where correctness, reliability, and performance matter.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and managing distributed databases in cloud-native environments.
- Experience with modern software development practices and tools, such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), Docker, and Git.
- Excellent communication skills with a proven ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A proven ability to thrive in remote-first, cross-time-zone teams, collaborating effectively to deliver impactful results.

Extra shine:

- Experience building kubernetes controllers or operators.
- Familiarity with database concepts, and how they are implemented: compilers, indices, query planning, optimization, materialized views, etc.
- Familiarity with modern authorization systems and access control models.

Life at AuthZed:

- Work with cutting-edge tech in a fast-growing industry.
- Enjoy a supportive team environment where your ideas make a genuine difference.
- Receive competitive pay tailored to your experience.
- Own a piece of the company with early-stage startup stock options.
- Access comprehensive benefits, including healthcare (for US team members) and insurance plans.
- Work fully remotely with flexible hours designed to fit your schedule and timezone.
- Connect with the team during our twice-yearly offsites focused on bonding, collaborating, and having fun together!

## About AuthZed

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: AuthZed provides authorization infrastructure for modern applications and develops SpiceDB, the open-source permissions database inspired by Google's Zanzibar.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Jake Moshenko (CEO), Jimmy Zelinskie (CPO), Joseph Schorr

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Authorization infrastructure, cybersecurity, software development
- **Target Customers**: B2B, focusing on engineering and product teams at technology companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises
- **Mission**: To help every organization build fast and secure authorization that scales, by providing battle-tested, open-source infrastructure.

## Products & Services
- **SpiceDB (Open Source)**: The core product — a permissions database inspired by Google's Zanzibar. It allows developers to build fine-grained, relationship-based access control (ReBAC) systems that can scale to billions of objects.
- **AuthZed Cloud**: A managed, self-service platform for deploying and running SpiceDB without operational overhead.
- **AuthZed Dedicated**: Single-tenant, dedicated SpiceDB deployments for enterprises requiring maximum isolation and compliance.
- **SpiceDB Enterprise**: The production-ready, licensed version of SpiceDB for self-hosted deployments with enterprise support.
- **AI Authorization**: Specialized infrastructure enabling AI systems (e.g., RAG applications) to securely access data while respecting user permissions.
- **SpiceDB Operator**: An open-source Kubernetes Operator for deploying and managing SpiceDB clusters.
- **AuthZed MCP Server & Claude Code Plugin**: Developer tools for integrating SpiceDB into AI coding workflows and local development environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Total Funding**: **$16.0 million**
    - Seed Round (Apr 2021): $3.9M led by Work-Bench
    - Series A (Jun 2024): $12M led by General Catalyst
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of **$1.2 million** (per LinkedIn)
- **Notable Investors**: General Catalyst, Work-Bench, Y Combinator (W21 batch), Amplify
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Headcount grew **24.1% YoY** to **34 employees** (as of mid-2025).
    - Operates across 8 countries (US, Spain, Kosovo, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Switzerland).
    - SpiceDB has significant community traction on GitHub and is used by notable companies like Netflix and Turo.
    - Actively hiring with 6 open positions, including senior engineering and developer advocacy roles.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open-Source Leadership**: AuthZed creates and leads SpiceDB, the most mature open-source implementation of Google's Zanzibar, giving them a strong community and credibility.
- **Proven Technology**: Built by a team with deep experience from Google, Red Hat, and CoreOS, directly leveraging their knowledge of building hyperscaler infrastructure.
- **Developer-First Approach**: Products are designed for developers, with a strong focus on APIs, SDKs, and tools like the MCP server and Claude Code plugin.
- **Scaling from Day One**: The SpiceDB architecture is designed to handle billions of relationships and millions of requests per second, removing a major scaling bottleneck for customers.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expanding the AI Authorization Market**: A major current focus is on enabling fine-grained authorization for AI applications, particularly Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
- **Growing the Platform**: Moving beyond the open-source core to build a comprehensive cloud platform (AuthZed Cloud/Dedicated) that makes it easy for enterprises to adopt and manage SpiceDB.
- **Community and Ecosystem Growth**: Investing in developer relations, community tools (MCP Servers, Claude Code Plugin), and documentation to drive adoption and build a strong ecosystem around SpiceDB.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-Edge Technology**: Work on a complex, high-impact infrastructure problem — building the "source of truth" for permissions that scales to Google-like levels.
- **Remote-First Culture**: The company is remote-first with a distributed team across the US and Europe, offering significant flexibility.
- **Well-Funded & Growing**: As a Series A company with $16M in funding and strong investor backing, it offers the stability and resources of a growing startup.
- **Strong Engineering DNA**: The team is heavily technical (36% of employees), with a culture that values open-source contributions and solving hard distributed systems problems.
- **Competitive Compensation**: Salaries for senior engineering roles range from **$140K to $210K**, demonstrating a commitment to attracting top talent.
- **Impact**: As a relatively small team (34 people), new hires can have an outsized impact on the product, technology, and company direction.

## Sources
1. [AuthZed Official Website](https://authzed.com/)
2. [AuthZed Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/authzed)
3. [AuthZed on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/authzed)
4. [AuthZed on Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/authzed)
5. [AuthZed on CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/authzed)
6. [SiliconANGLE: AuthZed raises $12M](https://siliconangle.com/2024/06/27/permissions-management-startup-authzed-raises-12m-accelerate-strategic-expansion/)

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