Engineering Manager - IAM (Go)

Job description

ABOUT BESTOW Life insurance is one of the world's most important products. It's also one of the hardest to build, distribute, and modernize. Bestow exists to change that. Bestow is a leading vertical technology platform serving some of the largest and most innovative life insurers. Our platform unifies the fragmented, legacy value chain, enabling carriers to launch products in weeks instead of years. Carriers choose us to scale and operate at unprecedented speed, powered by AI and automation. Bestow isn't selling policies. We're building the infrastructure that helps an entire industry move faster, reach more people, and deliver on its promise. Backed by leading investors (Goldman Sachs, Hedosophia, NEA, Valar, 8VC) and trusted by major carriers, Bestow is powered by a team that moves with precision, purpose, and heart. If you want to help reimagine a centuries-old industry with lasting impact, join us. Bestow offers flexible remote/hybrid work, meaningful benefits, equity, and substantial growth opportunities. Bestow uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit E-Verify.gov http://e-verify.gov. ABOUT THE TEAM The Engineering team is responsible for all technology for Bestow and the Bestow Platform. We serve employees, consumers, and enterprise customers. In addition to building software, we integrate and manage many third-party products used by employees and as part of the platform. Our major functional teams are product engineering, infrastructure, IT, data & analytics, and program management. Engineering works closely with product management and design to define and prioritize the product roadmap. WHAT YOU'LL DO As the Engineering Manager for the IAM team, you will lead a team of Software Engineers building the identity and access management foundation behind our digital life insurance enrollment experience. You will spend roughly 20% of your time writing production code, and that capacity is accounted for in team planning. The rest of your time goes to leading the team, shaping architecture, and partnering with Product Managers, Designers, and our enterprise partners. Our system runs on Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform and is composed of several microservices written in Go that integrate using gRPC, REST, and async messaging patterns. You will share responsibility for operating those workloads. Your first major initiative is IAM Platform Scalability: building an identity foundation that lets new enterprise customers onboard without engineering intervention, while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements. This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is open to remote candidates within the United States. #LI-Remote TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP: - Stay in the code and actively participate in system design and architecture decisions - Review pull requests regularly, with feedback that raises the bar on code quality - Own your team's quality standards: test coverage, documentation, code review practice, and the automation and quality gates that keep defects out of production - Debug and troubleshoot alongside your engineers, and lead the team through hard diagnostic work - Identify technical debt, build a remediation plan for it, and advocate for the time to do it IAM INITIATIVE OWNERSHIP: - Lead the evolution of our authorization model to support multi-tenant enterprise customers at scale - Architect the separation of authentication and authorization so each can scale, cache, and enforce policy independently across enterprise partnerships - Design a token strategy that balances security, partner flexibility, and platform cost, and manage the vendor relationships that go with it - Build automated user provisioning and de-provisioning so partner onboarding does not require engineering work - Solve for partner-specific requirements such as biometric re-authentication, extended session lifetimes, layered access policies, and regulatory audit needs OPERATIONAL HEALTH AND ON-CALL: - The IAM team shares a weekly on-call rotation covering authentication and authorization services, and this role takes a regular turn in it alongside the engineers on the team. We treat rotation health as a first class part of the job: right sized alerting, current runbooks, and following through on the operational fixes that keep the load predictable. - You will own the observability, monitoring, and alerting for your services, track uptime and incident metrics, and lead incident response when it is your team's service. BUILDING AND DEVELOPING THE TEAM: - Recruit, interview, and hire engineers for your team, and partner closely with Talent Acquisition on pipeline and calibration - Own the onboarding experience for new engineers, including current documentation and thoughtful 30, 60, and 90 day plans - Hold regular 1:1s focused on growth, and build individual development plans tied to what each engineer actually wants from their career - Coach engineers on both technical and professional skills, and find them stretch assignments that move them forward - Build an inclusive team where people trust each other enough to disagree productively, and address team conflict directly when it comes up PERFORMANCE AND DELIVERY: - Set clear, measurable expectations, give documented and actionable feedback, and run fair performance reviews with unambiguous outcomes - Address underperformance with both empathy and urgency, and raise it early rather than late - Translate product requirements into technical plans, estimate your team's capacity and timelines honestly, and deliver against those estimates - Own a realistic team roadmap and make the daily prioritization calls that keep it real - Track your team's delivery metrics, report on them in the monthly operating review, and come with a plan when something dips VISION AND STAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIP: - Set a technical north star for IAM that your team can make decisions against, and execute toward it incrementally rather than in one big bet - Translate company strategy into team-level work through RFCs, PRD input, and well-scoped tickets - Communicate status, progress, and risk to stakeholders early and transparently, and escalate with a proposed solution attached - Explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including senior leadership and external partners - Connect your team's work to business outcomes and make cost and benefit trade-offs explicit AI ADOPTION AND INNOVATION: - Model effective use of AI coding tools and set the standard for how agent generated changes get reviewed, tested, and attributed - Level up your team's AI practice through hands-on workshops, shared prompting patterns, and continuous iteration on the team's approach - Ensure the team follows security and quality best practices for AI tool usage - Create room for experimentation and calculated risk, and treat failed experiments as learning the team talks about openly WHO YOU ARE An Engineering Manager at Bestow is a highly technical leader who works at the intersection of people and technology. In this role you will be both a hands-on contributor and a people leader, and you find real satisfaction in both halves of that job. Core Requirements: - 8+ years of professional software experience, including 1+ years directly managing a team of Software Engineers while staying hands-on in the code - Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience - Professional experience with Go, or another statically typed backend language with a clear path to Go - Production experience with cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes or a comparable container orchestration platform - Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, comfortable writing ANSI SQL - Experience designing modern distributed systems and APIs, including Docker for local development and tools such as Protocol Buffers, OpenAPI, or Swagger - Lead with an end-to-end ownership mentality, combining high organizational standards with excellent communication to build, retain, and empower high-performing engineering teams. IAM and Authentication Experience (Highly Desired, Not Required): - Identity provider depth: hands-on experience with Auth0, Okta, or a similar platform, including tenant and organization configuration, connection management, and custom logic such as Rules or Actions - OAuth 2.0 and OIDC: working knowledge of OAuth flows, OpenID Connect, token types, JWT validation, and token lifecycle concerns like caching, rotation, and revocation - Multi-tenant architecture: designing authentication systems with tenant isolation, partner-specific branding, SSO configuration, and audit logging that holds up in a regulated industry - Authorization patterns: RBAC, ABAC, or policy-based access control, and experience separating authentication from authorization - Enterprise SSO and provisioning: integrating SAML 2.0 and OIDC connections for B2B partnerships, and SCIM for automated provisioning How You Work: - Deep understanding of the full software development lifecycle, from feature inception through system maintenance, continuous integration, and release strategy - Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools on a production codebase. Claude Code is the standard at Bestow and direct experience with it is preferred; comparable experience with tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot transfers well - Track key metrics and consistently meet established Service Level Agreements - Break down ambiguous technical problems and identify areas of risk early - Able to pick up and ship work in the team's codebases when the team needs it TOTAL REWARDS At Bestow, we’re proud to be awarded for our team members, innovative products, and culture. Our standard benefits include: - Competitive salary and equity based on role - Policies and managers that support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave programs - 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance - Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing - Flexible work-from-home policy and open to remote - Remote and WFH options, as well as a beautiful, state-of-the-art office in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, for those who prefer an office setting - Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives Recent Employer Awards include: - Best Place for Working Parents 2023 + 2024 + 2025 - Great Place to Work Certified, 2022 + 2023 + 2024 + 2025 - Built In Best Places to Work, 2022 + 2023 + 2025 - Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Texas 2022 + 2023 - Fortune’s Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance 2022 + 2023 + 2024 We value diversity at Bestow. The company will hire, recruit, and promote regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy or maternity, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We understand the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment and encourage individualism and authenticity in every team member. Thanks for considering a job at Bestow!