ABOUT BASETEN
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.
THE ROLE
The largest, most demanding enterprises run on Baseten, and they bring exacting requirements for how people, services, and agents access the platform. This is the founding role for our identity and authorization team within enterprise engineering. You'll own the identity and access layer of the Baseten platform: the authorization model, credential systems, and admin experiences that enterprise IT teams use to govern access for organizations like Harvey, HubSpot, and Notion.
You'll design and build Baseten's fine-grained authorization system from the ground up to support the workflows customers depend on today while giving them cleaner, more precise ways to manage access as the platform grows. Authorization at Baseten requires low-latency permission checks at high request volume, consistent contracts and behaviors across the product suite, and strong security guarantees for mission-critical, highly regulated workloads.
EXAMPLE INITIATIVES
Recent and upcoming work in this area:
Fine-grained authorization for users, service accounts, and agentic workloads: per-resource permissions at the organization, team, and workload scope to support both common workflows and complex enterprise access policies
Programmatic authentication allowing high-compliance customers to connect service principles securely via short-lived, workload-based credentials
Agent credentials that grant an agent exactly the access it needs for the given task and nothing more
Enterprise identity lifecycle including single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and per-organization session expiry policies
Admin controls for centralized visibility, auditability, and governance over credentials, roles, and access
RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead identity and authorization projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration.
Design authorization and credential models that support critical user workflows today and can be safely extended as the platform evolves.
Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to turn enterprise security requirements into durable technical solutions.
Establish engineering practices for quality, security, observability, and operational ownership.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship as the team grows.
REQUIREMENTS
4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems, including hands-on design and implementation of a product authorization system: per-resource or per-object permissions, relationship-based access control, a policy engine, or a fine-grained authorization system in the style of Zanzibar, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or Cedar.
Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: you've taken a system from first design through implementation, production rollout, and iteration with users.
Experience developing and operating multi-tenant systems at scale, where authorization checks sit in the request path and latency and consistency matter.
Comfort working across the full stack, from product and application code to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.
Preferred:
Experience with Python and Go.
Experience running an OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or similar deployment in production, beyond a proof of concept.
Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM at the protocol level.
BENEFITS
Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.
Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.
At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).
Skills Required
- 4-5+ years of experience building production backend systems
- Hands-on design and implementation of product authorization systems, including per-resource permissions, relationship-based access control, policy engines, or fine-grained authorization systems
- End-to-end ownership of systems from initial design through implementation, production rollout, and user-driven iteration
- Experience developing and operating multi-tenant systems at scale with authorization checks in the request path
- Ability to work across product and application code, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes infrastructure
- Experience with Python and Go
- Production experience running OpenFGA, SpiceDB, or a similar authorization deployment
- Working knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM at the protocol level
Baseten Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Baseten and has not been reviewed or approved by Baseten.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Feedback suggests pay targets the top of market with explicit ranges in postings and a stated aim to provide 90th percentile salaries with equity. Role descriptions emphasize competitive, experience-based pay bands and meaningful stock grants.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare is described as fully covered for medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families, reducing out-of-pocket costs. This comprehensive coverage is consistently highlighted alongside other core benefits.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off policies include unlimited PTO with a minimum expectation of at least four weeks, 16 paid company holidays, and a company-wide winter break. These elements indicate substantial protected time away from work.
Baseten Insights
What We Do
AI’s future won’t be a few massive models built by a handful of labs. It’ll be millions of specialized models embedded into every product, workflow, and experience by the people closest to the customer. The foundation of that future is inference. Inference determines the performance, reliability, latency, and economics of every AI product. For AI to scale globally, it must be as reliable, fast, cost-effective, and high-quality as possible. That’s why Baseten exists. Companies like Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence depend on Baseten to power mission-critical AI workloads in production.
Why Work With Us
We’re an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and operators building the Inference Cloud our AI future demands. We’re running at a hard systems problem that requires first-principles thinking across the entire stack. The bar is high. We work hard, move fast, and care deeply about quality.
