Senior Software Engineer - Machine & Workload Identity

Unified Identity Securing Classic and AI Infrastructure. Teleport, the AI Infrastructure Identity Company, prepares organizations for an AI future by establishing a unified identity layer for infrastructure, with humans, machines, workloads, and AI agents secured cryptographically with a hardware root of trust rather than vulnerable credentials. By replacing fragmented identity and access management systems with Infrastructure Identity, Teleport scales zero trust across cloud and on‑prem environments, eliminating the complexity and risk created by identity fragmentation and credential sprawl. Teleport protects infrastructure from identity attacks, accelerates engineering by reducing infrastructure complexity, and secures non‑deterministic agentic workflows.

Our Vision: Today's computing environments have too much complexity, too many network boundaries, and too little trust. Complexity slows engineers down and leads to human errors. Complex systems can’t be secure despite the red tape of bureaucracy. We make trusted computing simple. This gives engineers the freedom to move and build a better future.

Why Teleport: Teleport addresses the overlooked intersection between cybersecurity and infrastructure—an area companies have historically tried to manage through a fragmented mix of tools like PAM, network‑centric controls, and fragmented secrets management. This approach was already inefficient, but it fundamentally breaks down in the era of AI. AI changes the landscape in three critical ways:

• Non‑human, machine, and AI identities now outnumber human ones, driving massive secrets sprawl while worsening anonymity.
• Anonymity is incompatible with AI workloads: these systems are inherently non‑deterministic, operate across many services and environments, and therefore require strong identity, continuous trust, and end‑to‑end visibility to function safely and correctly.
• The non‑deterministic nature of AI makes reliability and scalability non‑negotiable—systems must be resilient, observable, and with access control guardrails, because failures and unexpected behavior cannot be handled with static controls or manual intervention.

Solving this problem requires a fundamentally different approach: a unified identity layer that spans machines, workloads, humans, and agents. Identity becomes the security control plane that replaces network location and long‑lived secrets as the basis of trust. Ephemeral privileges are critical in this model—privileges must be granted just‑in‑time, limited to the task at hand, and automatically expire, dramatically reducing blast radius in systems where behavior cannot be fully predicted. Finally, real‑time intelligence is essential: in fast‑moving, AI‑driven environments, access decisions must continuously adapt to context, behavior, and system state, rather than relying on static policies defined in advance.

Teleport addresses the growing gap between today’s cyber and infrastructure security posture and what modern, AI‑driven systems actually require. As AI systems proliferate, attack surfaces and pathways multiply, giving adversaries unprecedented leverage. The result is an inflection point: without re‑anchoring security and infrastructure around identity, real‑time trust, and ephemeral privileges, the volume and impact of security breaches will only accelerate.

About Us: Teleport is the Infrastructure Identity Company, modernizing identity, access, and policy for infrastructure, improving engineering velocity and resiliency of critical infrastructure against human factors and/or compromise. We are a fast‑growing, well‑funded Y‑Combinator company. We value our craft, are strong supporters of work/life balance, and embrace a culture of humility, honesty, and transparency.

About this job: The Machine & Workload Identity team at Teleport is on a mission to eliminate long‑lived secrets for non‑human identities. Today, machines, workloads, and AI agents routinely authenticate using static credentials that are difficult to rotate, easy to leak, and impossible to audit. We replace them with short‑lived cryptographic credentials, built on workload attestation and open standards like SPIFFE. We’re looking for a Senior Backend (Go) engineer to join the team. You will be involved in the entire product development cycle, from working with customers to understand their needs, to writing RFDs for your design ideas, to implementing distributed systems in Go. You will work closely with other engineers, product managers, and security researchers to design features that securely deliver cryptographic identity to machines, workloads, and AI agents at scale.

Projects you may work on:

• Designing and implementing novel solutions at the cutting edge of Agentic Identity.
• Building tooling to enable customers to efficiently onboard and manage identity for fleets of machines, workloads, and AI agents.
• Developing attestation methods for securely identifying machines, workloads, and AI agents without the need for secrets.
• Optimizing credential issuance mechanisms to function reliably at the scale of hundreds of thousands of machines.

You will play a key role in shaping how modern infrastructure access is secured, audited, and managed at scale.

Requirements:

• Go or Rust experience
• Linux systems engineering
• Cryptography engineering experience is a plus
• Experience with SPIFFE is a plus

Benefits:

• Extensive health coverage
• Annual expense budget
• Rest & recovery policies that maximize leave and your ability to recharge
• Investment in your future with retirement savings plans
• Equity in a US $1.1‑bn business
• Professional development opportunities

Do you have what it takes? Teleport is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any classifications protected by federal, state, or local law.