Staff-Level Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Keycard

About Keycard

At Keycard, we're building identity and 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. Keycard gives every agent a verified identity and issues short-lived, task-scoped credentials at runtime, so agents can only do what they were asked to do, and every action is fully auditable. We're backed by a16z, Boldstart, and Acrew, and our founding team built and scaled Snyk, Auth0, HashiCorp, and Heroku.

The Role

We're hiring two staff-level Software Engineers, Infrastructure to own how Keycard is built, shipped, and run.

Keycard is a control plane for agents: identity, credential exchange, delegation, policy, and audit. Many of the enterprises adopting it need that control plane inside their own cloud, behind their network controls, with no standing access for us. Bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) is a product at Keycard, not a services engagement. It's versioned, documented, and held to the same reliability and security bar as our hosted service.

You'll own Keycard's build and release systems, our multi-tenant cloud, dedicated deployments, and deployments in customers' cloud accounts. Build common delivery and operating tools across them, with release safety, reliability, cloud cost, and repeatable installs as priorities. You'll work with founders, engineers, product, and customers, and agree escalation and on-call with engineering. We build on AWS (and later GCP and Azure), EKS, Pulumi, and Helm.

What You'll Do

• BYOC product. Own what it's like to install, upgrade, and get support for Keycard in a customer's cloud, from what their security team reviews to how each version is documented.

• Compatibility. Decide what we support, from clouds, regions, and Kubernetes versions to customer guardrails like SCPs and egress proxies. Set the skew limits and deprecation policy that keep our control plane and customer-hosted deployments compatible.

• Deployments. Make a new deployment, ours or a customer's, a configuration change: infrastructure as code, account bootstrap, and network patterns like PrivateLink and certificates that work through customer proxies. For example: take a new customer's AWS account to a running, upgradeable deployment with no standing access from us.

• Releases. Own one pipeline from commit to running deployment, wherever it runs, with the control plane kept separate from the data plane. Get releases to many independently versioned deployments with staged promotion, approval gates, and rollback.

• Reliability. Set the availability and durability targets we hold ourselves to for the hosted service, with the observability, runbooks, and incident response behind them. Operate customer-hosted deployments without standing access, using audited break-glass.

• Agent operations. Build agents for the repetitive work: pre-install checks, installs, failed-upgrade triage, and runbook drafts. They run with scoped credentials, every action is audited, and an engineer approves any change to a customer account.

• Cost per install. Keep each install cheap in engineering time and cloud spend. Decide what's standard, what's configurable, and what we decline, so one customer's request doesn’t become the roadmap.

• Deployment guardrails. Work through reviews with customers' cloud and security teams. With security, set the guardrails for every deployment, from credential scope and isolation to workload identity and PKI, then build and run them.

What We're Looking For

• You build infrastructure as software in Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK, and write the Go or TypeScript tooling around it. You've run Kubernetes and Helm in production.

• Deep AWS experience, especially IAM and permission boundaries, Organizations and SCPs, and VPC networking.

• You've run software in accounts you don't control, like customer VPCs, on-prem, or regulated networks, and supported it through upgrades.

• You've shipped versioned releases that customers upgrade on their own schedule, with a support matrix and deprecations they could plan around.

• You debug across layers: a hung request that turns out to be a security group rule, a proxy that breaks a TLS handshake, a certificate challenge that can't reach the internet.

• You've worked directly with customers' platform and security teams, and turned down a one-off when a product change was better.

• You think in control plane and data plane: you've designed or run systems where the two are separate and upgrade independently.

• Agents at work. You already use coding agents in infrastructure work and have a clear view of where they're reliable and where a human has to review.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Experience building a BYOC, single-tenant, or self-hosted offering at an infrastructure, data, or security company.

• Experience with cell-based architecture.

• GCP or Azure alongside AWS, including private connectivity on those clouds.

• Workload identity and PKI in production: SPIFFE/SPIRE, cert-manager, private CAs.

• Experience with OAuth, OIDC, or mTLS, and interest in agent protocols like MCP.

Your First 90 Days

• Take a customer-hosted deployment from pre-production to production with the customer.

• Make the next install need no bespoke work, starting from the templates, bootstrap, and pre-install checks.

• Ship a release through one delivery pipeline to hosted and customer-hosted deployments, with staged rollout and rollback.

• Write down availability and durability targets for the hosted service, with the alerts and runbooks behind them.

Who Will Love This Job

• You want to build a product that runs in someone else's cloud and make it as solid as one you host.

• You'd rather fix the product than repeat a custom install.

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.