Staff Software Engineer - Identity & Access Management

Why join us

Brex is the intelligent finance platform that enables companies to spend smarter and move faster in more than 200 markets. By combining global corporate cards and banking with intuitive spend management, bill pay, and travel software, Brex enables founders and finance teams to accelerate operations, gain real-time visibility, and control spend effortlessly. Tens of thousands of the world's best companies run on Brex, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood, Zoom, Plaid, Reddit, and SeatGeek.

What you’ll do

The Identity and Access Management team builds and maintains secure, user-friendly authentication and authorization systems that protect users, safeguard company assets, and provide a seamless access experience for developers. The team owns critical platform capabilities including login methods, step-up authentication, our custom authorization platform, account delegation flows like Copilot, Pro Access login, embedded partnerships authentication, and core vendor integrations.

As a Staff Engineer on IAM, you will lead projects and initiatives to improve the security, reliability, and developer experience of our authentication, authorization, and identity platforms for customers, partners, and internal systems. You will scope and drive projects with clear impact, work cross-functionally with the broader engineering organization, help define the team’s technical quality, and help evolve the identity platform as Brex invests in signed identity propagation, delegated and agent identity, fine-grained authorization, stronger auditability, and enterprise-ready customer authentication experiences.

Where you’ll work

This role will be based in our New York office. We are a hybrid environment that combines the energy and connections of being in the office with the benefits and flexibility of working from home. We currently require Monday, Wednesday and Thursday to be designated in office days. As a perk, we also have up to four weeks per year of fully remote work!

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and APIs for authentication, authorization, identity context, and audit-related workflows.
• Lead engineers across the organization on initiatives end to end, from technical design and implementation through rollout, measurement, and operational support.
• Improve login and access experiences across SSO, MFA, step-up authentication, delegated access, and enterprise identity flows.
• Build and extend authorization systems that support custom roles, resource-aware access control, and secure defaults for product teams.
• Lead creation of durable, identity-aware audit trails and attribution for user, service, delegated, and agent-driven actions.
• Partner closely with engineers across Brex to make IAM integrations secure by default and easier to adopt through clear patterns, tooling, and shared libraries.
• Mentor engineers on the team to deliver high-quality code and produce operational improvements that raise the bar for reliability and maintainability across the team’s systems.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable production backend systems.
• Experience leading complex projects and mentoring other engineers.
• Strong API design fundamentals, rigor around testing, code quality, and documentation.
• Understanding of core IAM concepts such as authentication, authorization, sessions, tokens, MFA, SSO, OAuth, SAML, OIDC, or RBAC.
• Clear communication, cross-team collaboration, and effectiveness in cross-functional technical discussions.
• Passion for operational excellence and ability to improve system reliability, reduce toil, and maintain high-quality services over time.
• Strong product and engineering judgment with the ability to balance security, usability, and developer experience.

Bonus points

• Experience working on identity and access management, authentication, authorization, or audit systems in a production environment.
• Hands-on experience with Okta, Oso, SSO, SAML, OIDC, OAuth, or WebAuthn.
• Experience building enterprise-facing admin controls, authorization platforms, delegated access flows, or audit trails.
• Experience working on platform teams that provide shared infrastructure, paved roads, or secure-by-default frameworks for other engineering teams.