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 — enabling developers and security teams to create trusted, agent-native systems with confidence. At Keycard, data isn’t exhaust — it is core to the product. The systems you build will power near real-time feedback loops into customer workflows, inform policies and enforcement, and provide the analytics that help organizations understand and improve their security posture.

Your mission is to build resilient, low-latency data pipelines that drive product experiences end-to-end — from integrating external data sources, to enabling policy evaluation, to surfacing insights in dashboards and APIs. You’ll balance the challenges of streaming and batch systems — knowing when batch is the most powerful and understandable tool, and when low-latency streaming is essential. You’ll design data flows that serve both the transactional needs of our core systems and the OLAP requirements that drive customer insights.

You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with founders, customers, and team members, shaping the data architecture of Keycard together. You’ll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and the chance to help build a once-in-a-generation, category-defining company that reshapes how software is built.

This is a unique opportunity to:

• Invent Keycard’s Data Backbone: Design and build the operational and analytics data systems that make Keycard’s core product possible — powering near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights that become their trusted source of truth for their system.

• Build Trusted, Resilient Pipelines: Create streaming and batch pipelines that are fault-tolerant, observable, and reliable — delivering both low-latency operational data flows and high-quality analytics.

• Balance Streaming and Batch: Use the right paradigm for the job — streaming for low-latency enforcement and feedback, batch for clarity and power. Ensure the system as a whole can serve both transactional integrity and analytical depth, enabling customers to trust what they see and act on it quickly, while giving us the ability to iterate quickly.

• Empower Developers & Security Teams: Deliver APIs, data models, and pipelines that are ergonomic and transparent, enabling others inside and outside Keycard to build trusted systems on top of your work.

What We’re Looking For

• Operational & Analytics Systems Expertise: Strong experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms as needed. You know when to use streaming for low-latency enforcement, and when batch provides clarity and power. You’ve built systems that satisfy both transactional needs and OLAP requirements for customer insights.

• Product-minded, Pragmatic, Hands-On Systems Builder: A programmer at heart, fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust with experience building with Kafka, Parquet and Iceberg. You are excited by the prospects of object storage and streaming systems but know how to balance idealism with pragmatism to deliver today. You think like a builder, not an operator — excited to design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end-to-end that serve the needs of users first and foremost.

• Iterative Delivery in 0→1: Thrive in ambiguous environments, delivering iteratively to accelerate the learning loop while zooming out to ensure foundations are strong for the long term.

• Empathetic Leader & Builder: You combine empathy for developers, teammates, and customers with a craftsperson’s mindset. You lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while working shoulder-to-shoulder with others to build systems that empower everyone.

• Remote Collaboration Mastery: Experience in distributed teams; you communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, but know when to align quickly over a call or a doc.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

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

• Open Source Credibility: Contributions to data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, etc.) or building new libraries used by others.

• Agent-Native Builder: Experience experimenting with agents (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly.

• Vision for the Future: Strong opinions about the future of data, identity, and agents — and excitement to help define 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.