Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

What is a day in the life of a Principal Software Engineer (IAM)?

Maintain, scale, and optimize existing central authentication and authorization applications.

Triage, scope, and build incoming feature requests from cross-functional teams across Pattern.

Write, test, and deploy clean back-end code using Ruby and Go.

Design and enforce fine-grained RBAC across internal platforms and external APIs.

Collaborate with engineers and product stakeholders to integrate core security services.

Automate admin workflows and integrate AI solutions to enhance operational efficiency.

Monitor performance, reduce technical debt, and ensure high system availability.

What will I need to thrive in this role?

8+ years of back-end software engineering experience focused on core security, identity, or platform systems.

Proven experience building and maintaining central Authentication and Authorization systems.

Direct experience with RBAC/ABAC frameworks and security protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, JWT).

Strong capability to manage competing feature requests from multiple internal teams while maintaining legacy codebases.

Solid background with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and REST/gRPC APIs.

What does high performance look like?

You are seen and trusted as a primary subject matter expert and partner for central Auth/Authz and admin tooling across all of Pattern.

You strike an effective balance between rapidly delivering requested features for partner teams and systematically maintaining/refactoring existing applications to ensure system stability and reliability while preventing technical debt.

You communicate proactively with cross-functional stakeholders, setting realistic timelines and clear integration pathways for their feature requests.

You ensure our central Auth system is fault-tolerant, sub-millisecond in performance, and seamlessly adopted by all internal applications and external platforms.

You effectively delegate and monitor repeatable, task-focused feature and maintenance work with junior engineers, optimizing your time across both strategy and execution.

What is the team like?

You will partner with Engineering Leadership and collaborate with engineers across our global organization. The team follows a hybrid work schedule: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday in the office, and work from home on Tuesday and Friday.

Sounds great! What’s the company culture?

Game Changers: A game changer is someone who looks at problems with an open mind and shares new ideas with team members, regularly reassesses existing plans and attaches a realistic timeline to goals, makes profitable, productive, and innovative contributions, and actively pursues improvements to Pattern’s processes and outcomes.

Data Fanatics: A data fanatic is someone who recognizes problems and seeks to understand them through data, draws unbiased conclusions based on data that lead to actionable solutions, and continues to track the effects of the solutions using data.

Partner Obsessed: An individual who is partner obsessed clearly explains the status of projects to partners and relies on constructive feedback, actively listens to partner’s expectations and delivers results that exceed them, prioritizes the needs of your partners, and takes the time to create a personable experience for those interacting with Pattern.

Team of Doers: Someone who is a part of a team of doers uplifts team members and recognizes their specific contributions, takes initiative to help in any circumstance, actively contributes to supporting improvements, and holds themselves accountable to the team as well as to partners.

What is the hiring process?

1. An initial phone interview with Pattern’s talent acquisition team

2. A technical assessment 

3. An onsite interview with a panel of department leaders

4. Reference checks

5. Executive review