Software Engineer, Data

About Keycard

At Keycard, we’re building identity & 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 to complete dynamic tasks at runtime.

Our mission is to unlock the agent economy by empowering developers and enterprises with the secure, scalable foundations they need to build, deploy, adopt, and trust agentic applications. To do this, we’re building the real-time, in-band, contextual guardrails required to transition from human-driven to truly autonomous and agentic workflows that give users, builders, and security teams the confidence and control they need to bring agents out of the lab and into production.

At our core, we’re laser-focused on delivering a delightful, best-in-class developer experience that gives them the tools they need to create category-defining applications and experiences while giving platform and security teams the security, scalability, visibility, control, and enablement they need to accelerate their organizations journey to becoming agent native.

We’re a small, distributed team of repeat founders and builders, with backgrounds from Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku.

Joining Keycard now means helping define not just our technology, but also the culture and company we’re building together—during a once-in-a-generation platform shift.

The Role

We're hiring a Staff Data Engineer to design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard — the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights. At Keycard, data isn't exhaust — it's core to the product.

The systems you build will serve both the transactional needs of our core identity services and the OLAP requirements that help organizations understand and improve their security posture. You'll balance streaming and batch paradigms — knowing when low-latency streaming is essential and when batch provides clarity and power. Your work will span from integrating external data sources to enabling policy evaluation to surfacing insights in dashboards and APIs.

You'll work directly with founders, product, and the engineers building our core services and SDKs. You'll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and the chance to shape the data architecture of a category-defining company from the ground up.

What We're Looking For

• You have strong experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms. You know when to use streaming for low-latency enforcement and when batch provides clarity and power, and you've built systems that satisfy both transactional and analytical requirements.

• You're a programmer at heart — fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust, with experience building with Kafka, Parquet, and Iceberg. You think like a builder, not an operator, and you're excited to design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end to end.

• You thrive in 0→1 environments. You make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system, and you use iteration to accelerate the learning loop.

• You lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow. You communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience designing and shipping developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or tools that expose data systems in ergonomic and powerful ways.

• Contributions to open source data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg) or experience building libraries used by other developers.

• Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly.

• Strong opinions about the intersection of data, identity, and agents — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard.

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.

Why Join Us?

Keycard is building the fundamental unlock for the next generation of software: enabling truly secure and trusted agentic applications. Under the hood, we’re building a new identity and access control stack to take us from a world of static, user-focused, long-lived roles and credentialing to one of mixed machine & human interaction that is dynamic, contextually-scoped, and short-lived.

By joining as an early employee, you’ll have the opportunity to help curate a culture of iterative craftsmanship, disciplined design, empowerment to own meaningful problems, and consistent high-quality delivery with real impact. You’ll collaborate with the founders and investors who have championed identity, security, and developer tools from seed to scale with companies like Snyk, Auth0, and Heroku.

If you’re energized by tackling complex distributed systems and want to advance both developer productivity and security posture, with a hunger to learn, have an impact, and move quickly with determination we’d love to explore how you can help us shape the future of software.