Staff / Founding Engineer — Identity & Access Infrastructure (Part-time)

About the job

Staff / Founding Engineer — Identity & Access Infrastructure

About Nicklpass

Nicklpass helps enterprises see, govern, and optimize spending on software, AI, and paid knowledge tools. We started by simplifying news subscriptions for large organizations. We are expanding that foundation into infrastructure that lets employees and AI agents discover, purchase, and use tools within company policy.

Our vision is decentralized procurement with centralized governance: people and agents get the tools they need, while IT and finance set the rules, control budgets, and understand usage.

The role

We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to help build two core systems:

• Our enterprise SSO and identity layer, connecting company identities, vendor accounts, permissions, and provisioning.
• Our vendor access protocol, enabling fractional access to software, AI, data, and content.

Fractional access means vendor-authorized access for a defined period, task, or amount of usage. Imagine an employee accessing a research tool for a day, or an AI agent purchasing API capacity for a specific task, with company policy and spending limits enforced automatically.

You will design and build the infrastructure that makes this possible: authorization, provisioning, metering, expiration, and billing records.

This is a senior individual contributor role with founding-level ownership of a new platform. You will work closely with the CEO, engineering team, product, enterprise customers, and vendor partners. You should enjoy making architectural decisions, writing production code, and taking systems from an initial concept into customer use.

What you will build and own

• Enterprise SSO and identity integrations. Build federation, tenant onboarding, identity mapping, and provisioning using SAML, OIDC, OAuth, and SCIM. Integrate with providers such as Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, and Okta.
• Policy-driven access. Translate identity, permissions, company policies, and budgets into access decisions. Support approvals, just-in-time provisioning, expiration, and revocation.
• The vendor access protocol. Define APIs, entitlement models, and integration contracts for requesting, granting, metering, and ending access. Support time-based, task-based, and usage-based access within vendor agreements and capabilities.
• Human and agent authorization. Build delegated access, scoped permissions, short-lived credentials, and attribution so actions can be traced to the responsible person, agent, and organization.
• Metering and spend controls. Build usage pipelines, quotas, budget reservations, and reconciliation. Handle concurrent requests, retries, and delayed vendor reporting reliably.
• Reusable vendor integrations. Create adapters and developer documentation that make it practical to onboard vendors with different authentication, provisioning, and billing systems.
• Security and reliability. Own tenant isolation, secrets management, audit trails, observability, and failure handling for the services you build.
• Technical direction. Make build-versus-buy decisions, review designs, mentor engineers, and establish practices that support enterprise adoption.

What we are looking for

• A track record of designing, shipping, and operating complex production systems at a senior or staff level.
• Deep experience in identity, authentication, authorization, or access infrastructure, including production work with SSO or federation.
• Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals, including API design, data modeling, concurrency, event processing, and idempotency.
• Sound security judgment around credentials, tokens, permissions, and tenant boundaries.
• The ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear architecture, a focused first release, and a practical delivery plan.
• Comfort working directly with customers and partners to understand constraints and resolve integration challenges.
• Strong communication skills and a willingness to own implementation as well as architecture.

Our stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Drizzle. Relevant systems experience and engineering judgment matter more than familiarity with every framework.

Experience that would be especially useful

• Experience building, maintaining or improving SSO products
• Usage-based billing, payments, or financial reconciliation.
• API gateways, developer platforms, or protocol design.
• SaaS provisioning, license management, or enterprise identity integrations.
• Authorization and delegated access for AI agents.
• Browser extensions or desktop applications.
• Enterprise security reviews and SOC 2 readiness.
• Building an early-stage product from initial design through production deployment.
• Experience managing swarms of Agents to ship features quickly

What success looks like

In your first 90 days, you will map our existing identity and access architecture, define the initial protocol and security model, and ship an end-to-end pilot with a selected vendor.

A human or agent should be able to request access, pass policy and budget checks, receive access, generate measurable usage, and have that access expire or be revoked. You will establish the integration contracts and operational foundation for expanding across vendors.

Why join

You will help define how enterprises buy and use software as both people and agents become purchasers and users. This is an opportunity to build core infrastructure, work directly with enterprise customers and vendor partners, and shape the technical direction of a growing platform.

Apply Now

About the company

Nicklpass

Get access to news & information | One login for all your subscriptions | Built for teams11-50 Employees

Philadelphia

11-50

Digital Media

Enterprise Software

B2B

Subscription Businesses

Learn more about Nicklpass

Funding

AMOUNT RAISED

$1.2M

FUNDED OVER

1 round

Round

S $1200000

Seed - Apr 2018

View Nicklpass's funding history

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