Backend Engineer

PropelAuth provides the right level of authentication for all stages of a company. New startups can use our hosted pre-built UIs which provide the simplest possible integration. Out of the box, our customers immediately have the same auth experience as large tech companies like Slack. As those startups grow, they can use our APIs and component libraries to pull aspects of the experience into their product.

We’re also working on auth for AI products and MCP servers. As agents start accessing data and taking actions on behalf of users, developers need to know which user and organization an agent represents, what it’s allowed to do, and how that access can be revoked. It’s a new version of the same problem we’ve always worked on: making powerful authorization models easy for developers to use.

About the role

We pride ourselves on shipping code frequently and learning as we go. We also have critical security, performance, and uptime requirements, so finding the right ways to ship frequently within those requirements is very important.

We all love to learn and grow. Our leadership team has experience working with and mentoring engineers at both startups and top companies. We'll work with our hires to craft this role to their interests, skill set, and long term career goals.

If you’re passionate about building products that make a complex problem easy for your end users, this job is for you. As part of a small team, you’ll have the opportunity to shape both the product and the engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

• Our backend is written in Rust with a few parts in Python and TypeScript
• Design understandable, performant, and secure APIs for authentication and authorization
• Design architecture for high availability - as a critical part of our customer's stack, uptime and performance are incredibly important
• Learn and support new auth standards like MCP and WebAuthn
• Be creative! In addition to auth, we want to provide our customers with all the tools they need to be successful. As a small team, we like supporting our employees ideas.
• Build client libraries/middleware in a variety of different languages/frameworks - no language or community is too small
• Help manage infrastructure with Packer and Pulumi on AWS
• Work with our Support team to understand the needs of our users

What we look for from you:

• 3+ years engineering experience
• Experience working independently on small teams
• Excited to build products that customers love
• Ability to move quickly, but carefully
• Experience with authentication or security appreciated but not required

Working With Us:

• We're a remote-first team, spread over the US. Working hours are flexible but we ask that you have 4-5 hours of overlap with 9am-5pm PST
• We provide standard benefits - health insurance, PTO, etc
• We strongly believe in hiring employees that are experts at what they do, and that our job is to support each other

PropelAuth provides the right level of authentication for all stages of a company. New startups can use our hosted pre-built UIs which provide the simplest possible integration. Out of the box, our customers immediately have the same auth experience as large tech companies like Slack.

More than just authentication, we will also provide useful functions tied to a "user" or "organization", like analytics, billing/subscriptions, etc.