---
title: 'Software Engineer, Security at Keycard Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-security-keycard-labs-united-states-pk382974tazk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Software Engineer, Security at Keycard Labs

- **Company:** Keycard Labs
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/keycard-labs/0f3524bb-b20b-4513-9c8a-bf35d1078ba4

## Job description

## About Keycard

At Keycard, we're building identity and access infrastructure for the agent-native era, where software isn't static but a dynamic, constantly changing system of AI agents working on behalf of people and businesses. Keycard gives every agent a verified identity and issues short-lived, task-scoped credentials at runtime, so agents can only do what they were asked to do, and every action is fully auditable. We're backed by a16z, Boldstart, and Acrew, and our founding team built and scaled Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku.

## The Role

We're hiring a staff-level Software Engineer, Security. This is a software engineering role: you'll build and run the security program for what Keycard ships and runs, across our product, our infrastructure, and what we publish, mostly as code and automation. Security is everyone's job here. You'd be the first engineer whose whole job is security, working with engineers who already know the field. It matters because security is what we sell: a hole in our token exchange or policy checks hands a customer's agent access nobody granted. You find those holes early and build the tooling that catches the next ones. Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity, credential exchange, delegation, policy, and audit. It has to hold even when the agent itself is compromised. Agents are part of how we build, and part of how you'll do this job. You'll also secure Keycard itself: our cloud accounts, customer-hosted deployments, our pipeline, and secrets. You set the controls and run security response. Platform engineering runs the infrastructure; operations handles audits and customer reviews. You prioritize product and company security work by risk to customers and Keycard.

## What You'll Do

Secure the product

- Threat modeling. Trace how an agent gets access, from token exchange through delegation to the per-tool check at our MCP gateway, then attack it: confused deputies, poisoned tool descriptions, prompt injection, issuer and audience mix-ups, token passthrough. Credentials shouldn't leak between hops, and delegated access should end when it expires or is revoked.
- Assume compromise. Even a compromised agent should be stopped from escalating privileges or crossing tenants. Document what it can still do with its access.
- Design review. Review designs and code across the token service, Cedar policy engine, MCP gateway, CLI, SDKs, and Console, mostly for who can do what and whether zones stay isolated.
- Attack with agents. Run scoped agents against an isolated instance and chase the authorization failures they find. Confirmed failures become CI regressions for token exchange, impersonation, or per-tool policy. Example: a harness that follows a delegated credential end to end and checks it never gains scope or lifetime.
- Customer reviews. Be the technical voice when customers' security teams review or pentest us; operations runs the process.

Secure Keycard

- Cloud and delivery controls. Build agents that find and fix misconfigurations in cloud accounts, pipelines, and published artifacts, with scoped access and human review for their changes. With platform engineering, test isolation between deployments and audited break-glass access.
- Our own credentials. Keep them short-lived and narrow. Design service identity and PKI, sign what we ship to customers, and manage dependency risk. You also use Keycard to scope what our own agents can reach.
- Incident response. Investigate vulnerabilities and security events, coordinate fixes, and automate detection and routine fixes where you can. You'll also work out with engineering how on-call works for security.

## What We're Looking For

- You've shipped and maintained production code, not only security tooling, and you've found and fixed vulnerabilities in applications or identity systems.
- You can read unfamiliar code, build an exploit or reproduction, and ship the fix with a regression test.
- You know OAuth 2.0 and 2.1, OIDC, and token exchange (RFC 8693), and can describe failures you've seen, like refresh-token misuse.
- You can spot the problem in an IAM policy, a network path, or a cloud audit log, even if you've never run cloud infrastructure.
- You've built security tooling other engineers adopted that prevents recurring bugs, and you can explain what it catches, what it misses, and when fixes need human review.
- Agents at work. You use agents for review, triage, or testing, and know how to check their output and limit their access.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

- Experience in identity infrastructure, developer tools, or multi-tenant SaaS.
- Experience with DPoP, Cedar, or SPIFFE/SPIRE.
- Hands-on AWS security: IAM, SCPs, logging, infrastructure as code.
- Securing agents or MCP servers, including tool permissions and sandboxing.
- Public security work: CVEs, bug bounties, write-ups, or OAuth and MCP standards work.

## Your First 90 Days

- Month one: map trust boundaries in token exchange and one priority delegation flow, attack them, and compare findings with our risk register. Review the company security setup with platform engineering.
- Ship fixes for the findings we agree matter most, each with a CI regression.
- Build reusable evidence for customer reviews and a triage process for pentest findings; questionnaires stay with operations.
- By day 90: a product and company security roadmap with owners and incident roles, built from the risk register you now own.

Who Will Love This Job

- You'd rather break the product yourself than wait for a customer's red team to.
- You'd rather fix a class of bugs once than file the same finding twice.

## What We Offer

- Build at the Frontier: Work every day at the frontier of agent-native systems — shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn’t been built before. You’ll be given huge autonomy, the opportunity to gain mastery, and the chance to work in a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.
- Truly Agent-Native Culture: At Keycard, we don’t just enable others to adopt agents — we use them ourselves to build. You’ll help shape an organization that embeds AI into its foundation as an enduring competitive advantage.
- Compensation With Upside: Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff) give you the security to focus on building — and the asymmetric upside of ownership in a company chasing a category-defining mission.
- Comprehensive Benefits & Recharge: Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family, plus 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually. We encourage at least 2 weeks off each year to fully recharge.
- Tools That Keep You Ahead: A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and the best AI tools available so you can work at the forefront of agent-native workflows.
- Remote-First Flexibility: We are a remote-first team prioritizing asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America. Work where you’re strongest — we just want the best.

## About Keycard Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Keycard Labs is building the identity and access management layer for the emerging agent economy, enabling developers to securely connect people, AI agents, and services across distributed systems with dynamic, scoped credentials.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Wilmington, Delaware, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Ian Livingstone (CEO), Matthew Creager, Jared Hanson

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Identity infrastructure, cloud security, developer tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, platform engineers, and enterprises building AI agents and multi-agent systems
- **Mission statement**: “Redefine machine identity for the Internet—helping developers seamlessly connect people, agents, and services across networks, clouds, and applications.”

## Products & Services
- **Keycard STS (Security Token Service)**: An OAuth 2.1 authorization server that authenticates humans and agents and issues ephemeral, task-scoped tokens. Manages identity and access across zones, supports federation, workload identity, and agent-to-agent delegation.
- **Keycard CLI & SDKs**: Command-line tool and client libraries (Python, TypeScript) to run coding agents in policy-enforced sessions, add OAuth to MCP servers, and build custom agent-to-agent flows.
- **Keycard Admin Console**: Web interface for configuring identity policies, roles, SSO, audit logs, and billing.
- **Agentic Access Loop**: A patented architecture that introduces access control into the agentic loop, ensuring every agent action is authenticated, authorized, and audited.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $38M (Seed $8M in Apr 2025; Series A $30M in Nov 2025)
- **Notable Investors**: Andreessen Horowitz (led Series A), boldstart ventures, Acrew Capital, MANTIS Venture Capital, Essence VC, Matias Woloski, Ryan Carlson
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 1,550% YoY (from ~1–2 to 26 employees)
  - Acquired Anchor and Runebook to accelerate product and talent
  - Named to Redpoint’s InfraRed 100 in 2026
  - Delivered first production implementation of OAuth 2.1 Client ID Metadata Documents
  - Partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft for interoperability

## Competitive Advantages
- **Agent-native identity**: Unlike traditional IAM (Okta, Auth0), Keycard issues dynamic, intent-based tokens instead of static API keys, enabling real-time, context-aware access control for autonomous agents.
- **Open standards leadership**: Contribution to MCP, WIMSE, and OAuth extensions for agents; first production implementation of OAuth 2.1 Client ID Metadata.
- **Founding team depth**: CEO Ian Livingstone (Infra Pod host), Matthew Creager (scaled Snyk from $30M to $300M ARR), Jared Hanson (creator of Passport.js, former Chief Architect at Auth0).
- **Agentic access loop**: A novel architecture that closes the loop between agent requests, policy evaluation, and credential issuance, providing full audit trails.

## Strategic Focus
- **Near-term**: Build the foundational trust fabric for the agent economy; expand integrations with major cloud providers and agent frameworks; grow open-source adoption.
- **Long-term**: Become the default identity layer for the internet’s agent-native systems, enabling safe delegation from pilot to production across industries.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Deeply developer-first with a strong open-source ethos; team is distributed across the US, Canada, and UK with a heavy focus on engineering (48% technical roles).
- **Policy**: Likely remote-friendly given the distributed team; office presence in Wilmington, DE, with a small co-working-style hub.
- **Perks & impact**: Early-stage employee with significant ownership opportunity; work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of AI, security, and identity; close collaboration with world-class investors (a16z) and industry leaders.
- **Engineering culture**: Strong emphasis on standards contributions, developer experience, and autonomy; small team (26 people) means each hire has outsized influence on product and direction.

## Sources
1. [LinkedIn – Keycard Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/keycard-labs)
2. [CB Insights – Keycard](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/keycard)
3. [Keycard Docs – How Keycard Works](https://docs.keycard.ai/guides/how-keycard-works/)
4. [Andreessen Horowitz – Investing in Keycard](https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-keycard/)
5. [Keycard Docs – Home](https://docs.keycard.ai/)

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