Software Engineer, Systems

Keycard is building identity and access infrastructure for the agent-native era, aiming to empower developers and enterprises with secure and scalable foundations. They are seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to develop core systems and infrastructure that facilitate agentic applications, focusing on identity services, policy enforcement, and developer platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Build the core systems and infrastructure that power Keycard
• Create automation, pipelines, and developer platforms that make shipping reliable software the default
• Contribute to core product services and help shape how Keycard becomes an agent-native engineering organization
• Build Kubernetes operators and CI/CD automation
• Ensure the systems provide deterministic guarantees around delivery, consistency, and availability

Requirements:

• You're a builder first, operator second — a programmer at heart who uses Go and/or Rust to create platforms and product systems
• You've built developer-facing platforms (Kubernetes operators, CI/CD abstractions, internal tooling) as well as core services, and you think in terms of dynamic, reactive systems
• Strong distributed systems instincts
• You have expertise in consensus, coordination, and state management, and you build systems that are secure, resilient, and fault-tolerant with best-in-class observability
• You treat the path to production as a product surface
• You create automation, pipelines, and developer platforms that make shipping reliable software the default — empowering every engineer to deliver quickly and with confidence
• You thrive in 0→1 environments
• You make hard trade-offs to ship 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
• Experience with identity and access protocols (OIDC, OAuth, mTLS) and active engagement with emerging agent protocols like MCP and A2A
• Background in edge computing, intelligent routing, or globally distributed systems — with ideas about how to make agent-native applications fast and resilient anywhere
• Experience extending runtimes with eBPF, service meshes, custom Kubernetes operators, or plugin-driven architectures (WASM, dynamic policy engines)
• Hands-on experimentation with coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and strong opinions on how engineering organizations should adopt them