Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management

About AlphaSense

AlphaSense removes uncertainty from decision-making for the world’s most sophisticated companies. Our market intelligence and search platform, built on proven AI, delivers insights from trusted public and private content, including equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research. The 2024 acquisition of Tegus advances our shared mission to empower professionals with AI-driven market intelligence, combining complementary product and content capabilities for more comprehensive insights across thousands of content sets.

Trusted by over 6,000 enterprise customers—including a majority of the S&P 500—AlphaSense was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in New York City, with more than 2,000 employees globally across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland.

About The Team

The User Management team owns the full identity lifecycle at AlphaSense—from creating and provisioning users, through managing their identities, to authenticating and authorizing their access. Our work spans three core domains:

• User Management: creating, provisioning, and managing user identities
• Authentication: verifying user identities
• Authorization: determining user permissions within the system

As a product platform team, we build the identity and access infrastructure that other engineering teams rely on, rather than shipping user-facing features. We also serve as a security guardrail, ensuring the platform remains secure. The team is senior and well-established, based in Helsinki, Finland, and is expanding into North America to provide follow-the-sun coverage and scale our authentication and authorization systems for self-service across the company.

About The Role

This Staff Engineer role focuses on managing identity and access for AlphaSense’s growing customer base, with nearly every product engineering team depending on our systems for user and entitlement data. You’ll work across all three pillars of identity—user management, authentication, and authorization—designing scalable systems for a constantly expanding user base. Security is central to this role; you’ll collaborate closely with security teams to ensure our systems are secure by design, compliant with SOC2 and GDPR.

We’re seeking a senior, self-sufficient engineer with experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms at scale, ideally in a platform or product-platform context. You’ll help shape the roadmap, drive execution autonomously, and collaborate closely with our Helsinki-based team while working in a distributed, cross-timezone setup.

Who You Are

• Backend: Java 2X, Spring Boot 3.X.X, WebFlux, Maven
• Data & APIs: SQL, GraphQL, gRPC, REST
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Helm
• Identity & Security Protocols: RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC; OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and JWT; SAML 2.0 and enterprise SSO federation (assertion validation, signature/encryption handling, IdP- vs. SP-initiated flows); SCIM for user provisioning and deprovisioning
• Engineering Practices: Event-driven architecture patterns; TDD or a passion for automated testing

Nice to Have: Auth0 experience, SpiceDB/Zanzibar-style authorization systems, Apollo Federation, OpenTelemetry, experience in SOC2/GDPR-compliant environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve our authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC) to answer “what can this user do?”
• Design, build, and evolve our authentication platform, covering diverse use cases and integrating with Auth0
• Design, build, and evolve our user management platform—creating, provisioning, and managing identities and entitlements for our entire customer base
• Partner with security teams to ensure authentication, authorization, and user management platforms are secure by design and compliant with SOC2 and GDPR
• Design and implement highly scalable systems to keep pace with a growing user base
• Help define the long-term roadmap across authentication, authorization, and user management
• Build self-service systems and APIs (GraphQL, gRPC, REST) for product engineering teams
• Drive projects autonomously from North America while collaborating with our Helsinki-based team
• Champion testing, observability, and reliability practices across the platform

Pay

Compensation Range: $202,400—$278,300 USD. Final offer amounts consider candidate experience and expertise. You may also be offered equity and a generous benefits program.