---
title: 'Software Engineer - Identity & Authorization at Baseten'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-identity-authorization-baseten-san-francisco-m144rq5swsse'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Software Engineer - Identity & Authorization at Baseten

- **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $240k–$285k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/19972142-ec0b-4049-8d8f-6a341f57f938

## Job description

## ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our [$1.5B Series F](https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/), led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

## THE ROLE

The largest, most demanding enterprises run on Baseten, and they bring exacting requirements for how people, services, and agents access the platform. This is the founding role for our identity and authorization team within enterprise engineering. You'll own the identity and access layer of the Baseten platform: the authorization model, credential systems, and admin experiences that enterprise IT teams use to govern access for organizations like Harvey, HubSpot, and Notion. You'll design and build Baseten's fine-grained authorization system from the ground up to support the workflows customers depend on today while giving them cleaner, more precise ways to manage access as the platform grows. Authorization at Baseten requires low-latency permission checks at high request volume, consistent contracts and behaviors across the product suite, and strong security guarantees for mission-critical, highly regulated workloads.

## EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

Recent and upcoming work in this area:

- Fine-grained authorization for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads: per-resource permissions at the organization, team, and workload scope to support both common workflows and complex enterprise access policies
- Programmatic authentication allowing high-compliance customers to connect service principles securely via short-lived, workload-based credentials
- Agent credentials that grant an agent exactly the access it needs for the given task and nothing more
- Enterprise identity lifecycle including single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and per-organization session expiry policies
- Admin controls for centralized visibility, auditability, and governance over credentials, roles, and access

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration.
- Design authorization and credential models that support critical user workflows today and can be safely extended as the platform evolves.
- Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise security requirements into durable technical solutions.
- Establish engineering practices for quality, security, observability, and operational ownership.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship as the team grows.

## REQUIREMENTS

- 4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems, including hands-on design and implementation of a product authorization system: per-resource or per-object permissions, relationship-based access control, a policy engine, or a fine-grained authorization system in the style of Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar.
- Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: you've taken a system from first design through implementation, production rollout, and iteration with users.
- Experience developing and operating multi-tenant systems at scale, where authorization checks sit in the request path and latency and consistency matter.
- Comfort working across the full stack, from product and application code to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.

Preferred:

- Experience with Python and Go.
- Experience running an OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or similar deployment in production, beyond a proof of concept.
- Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM at the protocol level.

## BENEFITS

- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
- 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
- Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
- Paid parental leave
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
- Company-facilitated 401(k)
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you. At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).

## About Baseten

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform that provides high-performance inference infrastructure for deploying, optimizing, and managing AI models in production.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Phil Howes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing / MLOps
- **Target customers**: B2B, targeting AI-native companies, enterprises, and developers building and deploying large-scale AI applications. Notable customers include Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Provide the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed for teams to bring performant AI products to market as quickly and reliably as possible. The company's core belief is that "inference is everything" and that the future of AI will consist of millions of specialized models embedded into every product and workflow.

## Products & Services
- **Baseten Cloud**: A fully-managed, global deployment platform for AI models. Provides out-of-the-box performance optimizations, 99.99% uptime, and massive horizontal scale. Supports single-tenant and self-hosted (hybrid) deployments.
- **Baseten Inference Stack**: The proprietary, underlying technology that powers the platform. Includes custom model runtimes (LLMs, embeddings, voice AI, image generation), advanced caching, custom kernels, and cutting-edge performance research. Claims 2x higher throughput and 10% lower latency for embeddings (BEI).
- **Baseten Chains**: Enables granular hardware and autoscaling for compound AI systems, reportedly powering 6x better GPU usage and cutting latency in half.
- **Frontier Gateway (Pre-optimized Model APIs)**: Allows users to instantly test and deploy pre-optimized versions of the latest open-source, custom, and fine-tuned models (e.g., Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, gpt-oss).
- **Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)**: A service offering where Baseten engineers work side-by-side with key customers to build, optimize, and scale their models from prototype to production.
- **Training on Baseten**: Allows users to train models and deploy them in one click on the inference-optimized infrastructure.
- **Monetization API**: An inference API that allows model developers to monetize their models.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not privately disclosed, but the company has raised a total of **$585M** in funding.
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of **$7.0M** (as per LinkedIn). Total funding of **$585M**.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: IVP, Spark Capital, Bond, CapitalG, South Park Commons, Greylock.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Announced a **Series F** funding round (details not fully public in search results).
    - **Massive headcount growth**: 224.4% year-over-year, now employing 201 people.
    - **LinkedIn follower growth**: 199.9% year-over-year.
    - **Active job postings**: 112 open roles.
    - Acquired the company **Parsed**.
    - Backed by high-profile institutional investors including CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) and IVP.

## Competitive Advantages
- **High-Performance Inference Stack**: A proprietary, deeply optimized stack focusing on ultra-low latency and high throughput for the most demanding Gen AI workloads (voice AI, real-time streaming, complex compound AI systems).
- **Customer Obsession & Forward Deployed Engineering**: A hands-on, consulting-style approach with their FDE team, which builds deep, sticky relationships with high-value customers like Abridge and Notion.
- **Global & Hybrid Cloud Flexibility**: Offers both fully-managed cloud and self-hosted deployments within customer VPCs, providing scalability and security for enterprises with strict data governance requirements.
- **Founding Team's Deep Technical Credibility**: Built by former researchers and engineers who experienced the "deployment hell" of AI systems firsthand, giving them deep empathy and expertise in the problem they are solving.

## Strategic Focus
- **Dominating the "Inference-as-a-Service" Market**: The company's core thesis is that inference will become the largest market ever created, and they are building the infrastructure to power it.
- **Scaling for High-Volume, Mission-Critical Workloads**: Focus on reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency for customers who cannot afford downtime or latency (e.g., AI phone calls, real-time translation).
- **Deepening the Technical Stack**: Continuously investing in performance research (custom kernels, new decoding techniques) and expanding capabilities into new areas like voice AI and audio streaming.
- **Aggressive Hiring**: With 112 open positions and massive YoY growth, scaling the engineering, sales, and operations teams is a clear priority.

## Why Work Here
- **Hard Technical Problems**: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment.
- **High Growth Trajectory**: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities.
- **Strong Engineering Culture**: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0).
- **Top-Tier Team & Investors**: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision.
- **Hybrid/In-Office**: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups.

## Sources
1. [Company Website](https://www.baseten.co/)
2. [Careers Page](https://www.baseten.co/resources/careers/)
3. [About Us (Team)](https://www.baseten.co/about-us/)
4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/baseten)
5. [Ashby Careers Portal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten)

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