---
title: 'Software Engineer — Backend Platform at Better Auth'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-backend-platform-better-auth-san-francisco-qvr8f6f27tj0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer — Backend Platform at Better Auth

- **Company:** Better Auth
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/better-auth/am9icG9zdDphKiaf3tRisipSMNoR-3nA

## Job description

## About Better Auth

Better Auth is the most comprehensive authentication framework for TypeScript. We're the most upvoted YC Launch in history and are used by thousands of developers shipping everything from startup projects to enterprise products.

We’re a small team building foundational infrastructure that other developers depend on, so the bar is high: every decision we make affects security, correctness, and developer experience at scale. We’re also building an enterprise layer on top of the open-source framework for teams that need more operational, organizational, and compliance-oriented capabilities.

## The Role

You’ll own the backend and platform development of Better Auth Infrastructure for both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployments. That means designing and shipping new platform capabilities, making the system more reliable and performant as it scales, and driving the deployment, observability, and compliance foundations required for enterprise customers.

Your focus will be on APIs, runtime architecture, data systems, event pipelines, edge/serverless services, and deployment models. You’ll collaborate with the product and dashboard side of the team, but your core responsibility is the infrastructure that powers it. This isn’t a role where you’re handed tickets — you’ll help define what we build next, how we operate it, and how we package it for customers running it themselves.

## Why You Should Join

You’ll work on the systems behind production authentication: event ingestion, data pipelines, edge/serverless services, analytics, deployment paths, and the operational foundations customers depend on when their production auth stack needs to be reliable, observable, and secure. The product is live and growing, and the problems are real — scaling infrastructure, improving reliability, supporting enterprise requirements, and designing a path from hosted deployments to self-hosted environments.

This is an opportunity to shape core infrastructure while the architecture and operating model are still being defined. You won’t just be tuning isolated services or maintaining internal plumbing. You’ll help decide how Better Auth Infrastructure is built, deployed, observed, and operated in production, with direct influence on the platform roadmap and the reliability bar we set for customers.

## What You'll Work On

- Feature development — designing and shipping new backend and platform capabilities across the infrastructure layer, from API design and service boundaries to data flows, analytics pipelines, and internal platform tooling
- Scaling and performance — making the platform handle more load, more reliably; identifying bottlenecks before they become incidents and designing systems that grow gracefully
- High availability — owning the reliability posture of the platform: monitoring, alerting, graceful degradation, incident response, and the operational discipline that keeps things running
- Deployments and distribution — improving the way we run the hosted platform today while designing the packaging and operational model for self-hosted deployments, with a strong focus on containers, upgrade paths, and production operability
- Security compliance — implementing the controls, audit trails, and data handling practices that SOC 2 and enterprise customers require — not just checking boxes, but building it right

## What We're Looking For

- Experience level — 7+ years of software engineering experience, with strong TypeScript and deep backend or infrastructure experience
- Backend depth — you’ve designed APIs, modeled data, and shipped systems that handle real production load; you know what breaks at scale and how to get ahead of it
- Edge/serverless experience — you’re comfortable designing and operating systems that run in edge or serverless environments and understand the runtime, observability, and architectural tradeoffs involved
- Reliability mindset — you think about failure modes, observability, operational burden, and recovery paths when you design systems, not after the fact
- Container and deployment experience — you’ve containerized production services and built or operated deployment workflows around them; you’re comfortable with image design, configuration, health checks, rollout safety, and production debugging
- Security fundamentals — familiarity with auth concepts like session management, token handling, access control, and common vulnerabilities; you write secure code by default, not as an afterthought
- SOC 2 familiarity — you understand what controls, audit logging, and data handling practices are required at the implementation level, not just the audit surface
- Shipping instinct — you can take a product direction, scope the technical work, and own it from design through production
- Comfort with distributed systems — you’ve worked with async pipelines, event-driven systems, or multi-service architectures and understand the tradeoffs they introduce

Bonus Points

- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS products and the data isolation and permissioning challenges that come with them
- Familiarity with enterprise identity standards: SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM
- Experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems, especially in support of self-hosted or enterprise deployment models

## Compensation & Benefits

- Competitive salary + meaningful equity with room to grow
- Health, dental, vision
- Unlimited PTO (that we actually encourage you to use)
- SF office access + daily catered lunches & snacks

Better Auth is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better security infrastructure.

## About Better Auth

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Better Auth is an open-source authentication framework for TypeScript that lets developers implement auth flows on their own database, now part of Vercel.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage, acquired by Vercel in 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Developer tools / Authentication infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B and B2C developers building web applications – from side projects to enterprise systems
- **Mission**: To make high‑quality authentication something every developer can own, without outsourcing to third‑party auth services.

## Products & Services
- **Better Auth Framework**: Composable, plugin‑based authentication library for TypeScript, supporting social sign‑on, multi‑tenancy, enterprise features (SSO, SAML, SCIM), bot detection, and agent auth.
- **Better Auth Infrastructure**: Optional hosted layer that adds an admin dashboard, user management, analytics, audit logs, security detection, and global session storage.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $5.125M (seed rounds); 13K+ GitHub stars, 350K+ monthly npm downloads, 10M+ downloads/month across frameworks
- **Notable Investors**: Peak XV Partners (lead), plus 50+ funds and angel investors
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid adoption (recommended by Next.js, Nuxt, Astro); used by ChatGPT, Google Labs, Cal.com, and many YC startups; acquired by Vercel in 2026 to accelerate open‑source auth and agent security.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Developer‑first**: Auth lives in the developer’s own codebase – version‑controlled, type‑safe, and reviewable in PRs – unlike third‑party services.
- **Ecosystem endorsement**: Official recommendation from major JavaScript frameworks.
- **Future‑ready**: Early mover in agent authentication (Agent Auth Protocol), now backed by Vercel’s infrastructure and distribution.

## Strategic Focus
- With Vercel, the team is doubling down on securing agentic workflows and integrating auth primitives into Vercel’s platform (Eve, Vercel Connect, Vercel Passport), while continuing to enhance the open‑source Better Auth framework.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small, fast‑moving team (4‑6 people) with outsized impact; thriving open‑source community (5K+ Discord, 7K+ X followers).
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Headquarters in San Francisco, but team members are distributed across the US, Uruguay, Ethiopia, and France – remote‑friendly.
- **Notable perks**: Work on one of the most widely used auth libraries; shape the future of auth for AI agents; now with Vercel’s scale and resources.
- **Current opening**: Developer Relation Engineer ($140K‑$180K + 0.25%‑1.00% equity) – blends engineering, community leadership, and content creation.

## Sources
1. [better-auth.com](https://better-auth.com)
2. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/better-auth)
3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/better-auth)
4. [better-auth.com/blog](https://better-auth.com/blog/better-auth-joins-vercel)
5. [ycombinator.com/jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/better-auth/jobs/eKk5nLt-developer-relation-engineer)

## Other roles at Better Auth

- [Developer Relations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-engineer-better-auth-san-francisco-k16aw3rn3ebt) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer — Agent Auth Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-agent-auth-platform-better-auth-san-francisco-8gw0fa9dckyp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer — Open Source](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-open-source-better-auth-san-francisco-g9mk4p4yvrf1) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer — Full Stack](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-full-stack-better-auth-san-francisco-kg8b225e7367) — San Francisco, CA