VAST Data is looking to add a Senior Software Engineer – Authentication & Authorization to our growing team!
This is a unique opportunity to join one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies in history—at the heart of the AI revolution.
“VAST’s data management vision is the future of the market.” – Forbes
At VAST, we’re building the data platform for the AI era—software infrastructure that powers the capture, refinement, protection, and activation of massive datasets across data center, edge, and cloud. Our platform is redefining what’s possible in high-performance, scalable data systems, and we’re just getting started.
About the Role:
We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to build high-performance authentication and authorization services for a large-scale distributed storage system. You'll design and implement systems that make authorization decisions on the critical path of storage requests, balancing low latency, correctness, and scalability while integrating efficiently with external AAA services.
This is a systems engineering role. You'll work in modern C/C++ on Linux, own features end-to-end, and solve production problems that only emerge at scale. The systems you build will handle demanding enterprise workloads where correctness, observability, and performance are equally important.
If you enjoy understanding systems deeply, debugging complex production behavior, and taking ownership of critical infrastructure, you'll fit well on this team.
What You'll Do
- Design and implement authentication and authorization services in C/C++
- Integrate efficiently with external AAA services and their wire protocols
- Build low-latency, highly scalable authorization paths for distributed storage workloads
- Own features from requirements and design through implementation, testing, rollout, and production support
- Debug complex production issues using traces, metrics, and logs
- Optimize performance, scalability, and resource utilization under realistic workloads
- Improve the observability, reliability, and maintainability of the system
- Work directly on problems encountered by enterprise customers and AI infrastructure deployments
What You Won't Be Doing
- Building features that never reach production
- Working on isolated prototypes with little customer impact
- Spending your time in unnecessary meetings instead of engineering
Responsibilities
- Make sound technical decisions around access control APIs, external AAA integration, caching strategies, correctness, performance, and operability
- Own significant areas of the codebase and drive their technical direction
- Turn ambiguous requirements into well-designed, production-ready solutions
- Maintain a high engineering bar for code quality, testing, and operational excellence
- Write software that remains reliable under concurrency, retries, failover, and large-scale production workloads
- Improve the simplicity, observability, and maintainability of the system over time
• Strong software engineering experience with modern C/C++
• Experience building production systems in one or more of the following areas:
Distributed systems
Storage systems
Networking or TCP/IP
Infrastructure software
• Strong understanding of concurrency, synchronization, failure handling, and long-running services
• Comfortable working close to operating system, storage, and networking boundaries
• Demonstrated ownership of production systems from design through long-term maintenance
• Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
• Passion for building reliable infrastructure software that operates at scale
Skills Required
- Strong development skills in C, C++, or Python
- Systems programming experience
- Solid understanding of networking concepts
- Familiarity with version control tools
- Experience in storage systems or file systems
- BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
VAST Data Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about VAST Data and has not been reviewed or approved by VAST Data.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, vision and life insurance are included, with several elements identified as employer-provided. Coverage aligns with what is commonly offered by high‑growth tech companies.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off includes generous or unlimited PTO alongside paid sick days and paid holidays, coupled with remote or work‑from‑home flexibility. This breadth supports taking time away when needed.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Company equity is a standard part of offers with a typical four‑year vest, and professional development support is available. Equity is positioned as a meaningful component of total compensation at a growth‑stage company.
VAST Data Insights
What We Do
Meet the data platform company for the AI era. Accelerating time-to-insight for workload-intensive applications, the VAST Data Platform delivers scalable performance, radically simple data management and enhanced productivity for the AI-powered world. Launched in 2019, VAST is the fastest-selling data infrastructure startup in history.
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