Level

Vanta

Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity

Vanta is hiring a Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $195k-$263k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Vanta.

Level's read on this job

  • Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • Pay on this posting starts 16% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • This is listed as a remote role.
  • The posting mentions MCP, Cli and backend among its tools and skills.
  • Vanta has 82 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Design identity primitives and permission models to secure autonomous agent behavior and agent-assisted actions at scale.

mcpcli
backendidentity-managementsecuritydistributed-systems

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. As a Senior Software Engineer at Vanta, you’ll be responsible for setting technical direction to provide a strong foundation for our infrastructure to scale with our business. You will also drive complex projects across our technical stack and mentor our talented engineering team. Your past experience will be leveraged to enable and accelerate Vanta’s growth.

Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog to learn more about what our team is working on! 

What you’ll do as a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team at Vanta:

As Vanta expands its agentic capabilities across surfaces like MCP, CLI, and the Vanta Agent, the Identity team is at the center of a new set of problems: defining what it means for an agent to act as a user's proxy, enforcing consistent permission checks across every invocation surface, and building an attribution model that makes agent-assisted actions auditable and trustworthy. You'll help design the identity primitives that make autonomous agent behavior safe and governable at scale.

You will also:

  • 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 tradeoffs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation

  • Drive initiatives to increase operational posture and execution quality across the engineering organization

How to be successful in this role:

  • Industry experience with backend software 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

  • Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness to learn, and sound judgment in applying AI responsibly to improve efficiency and impact

What you can expect as a Vanta'n:

  • Industry-competitive salary and equity

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans

  • 16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents

  • Health & wellness stipend

  • Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend

  • Commuter benefits for team members who report to the SF and NYC office

  • Family planning benefits

  • Matching 401(k) contribution with immediate vesting

  • Flexible PTO policy, plus 80 hours of Sick Time

  • 11 company-paid holidays

  • Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events!

  • Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Sydney

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors and may vary based on candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

#LI-remote

At Vanta, we are committed to hiring diverse talent of different backgrounds and as such, it is important to us to provide an inclusive work environment for all. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender identity, age, religion, sexual orientation, veteran or disability status, or any other protected class. As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage and welcome people of all backgrounds to apply.

About Vanta

We started in 2018, in the wake of several high-profile data breaches. Online security was only becoming more important, but we knew firsthand how hard it could be for fast-growing companies to invest the time and manpower it takes to build a solid security foundation. Vanta was inspired by a vision to restore trust in internet businesses by enabling companies to improve and prove their security. From our early days automating security monitoring for compliance standards like SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 to creating the world's leading Trust Management Platform, our vision remains unchanged. 

Now more than ever, making security continuous—not just a point-in-time check— is essential. Thousands of companies rely on Vanta to build, maintain and demonstrate their trust— all in a way that's real-time and transparent.

Referral Instructions

If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.

   

How we rate this

Backend Senior Software Engineer, Identity at Vanta rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

BackendIdentity ManagementSecurityDistributed SystemsMCPCli

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$195k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 16% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where identity management was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where security was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used MCP in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Backend, Identity Management, Security, Distributed Systems, and MCP. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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