Keycard Labs
Software Engineer, Data
About this role
Keycard is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to design and build core operational data systems for an identity and access platform serving the agent economy. You'll own the architecture for streaming and batch pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that power real-time enforcement and customer insights, working directly with founders and core engineering teams in a greenfield environment.
What you'll do
- Design and build resilient data pipelines balancing streaming and batch processing for transactional and analytical workloads
- Architect storage layers and APIs that serve both real-time enforcement needs and OLAP requirements for security insights
- Integrate external data sources and enable policy evaluation systems across the platform
- Build developer-facing data APIs and tools that expose complex systems in ergonomic ways
- Work directly with product, founders, and core service teams to translate requirements into data architecture
- Make architectural trade-offs to deliver immediate value while establishing long-term scalable systems
What they're looking for
- Pipeline design with streaming and batch paradigms (Kafka, Flink expertise preferred)
- Programming in Python, Go, and/or Rust
- Data storage formats and systems (Parquet, Iceberg)
- API design for developer-facing data tools
- System architecture and data modeling
- Technical leadership and mentoring
- Async communication and planning
- 0→1 product building and iteration
Benefits
- Work on frontier AI and agent infrastructure technology
- Significant autonomy and technical ownership
- Direct collaboration with founders and leadership
- Opportunity to shape company culture and data architecture from inception
- Market-competitive salary and equity
- Remote work (US-based)
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Keycard Labs
Keycard Labs builds an identity and access control plane designed specifically for AI agents, enabling secure and scalable governance across agent-native applications. The company is hiring staff-level and senior engineers across platform infrastructure, identity systems, data engineering, SDK development, and full-stack product roles to build this foundational technology.
View all jobs at Keycard LabsLikely interview questions
- Walk us through a complex data pipeline you've designed that balanced streaming and batch requirements. What trade-offs did you make, and how did you know which paradigm to use for different parts of the system?
- Describe your experience with Kafka, Parquet, and/or Iceberg. How have you used these technologies to solve specific problems, and what are their strengths and limitations in your experience?