Senior Engineer, Agentic Identity

Job description

**ABOUT BASELAYER** --- Every business in America needs a bank account to exist. The system that decides whether they're real, who's behind them, and whether they're a risk, runs on infrastructure from the 1980s. We're rebuilding that layer from scratch. Baselayer is the identity layer for institutions across the United States — the most complete business graph in America and every human tied to it. We fuse public records, IRS data, sanctions lists, web signals, and fraud telemetry from 2,200+ financial institutions into a single graph that resolves any business and the humans behind it in milliseconds. The legacy credit bureaus took 50 years to build something that gets 60% match rates. We've built something that gets 98% in under two years. Today we're trusted by over 20% of financial institutions in America — including FIS, Rho, Socure and leading loan infrastructure providers. But the graph is becoming infrastructure for anyone who needs to know if a business is real and worth trusting: gig platforms, marketplaces, AI companies, and commerce infrastructure at scale. Trust is the substrate of every financial transaction. We're rebuilding it. **ABOUT THE TEAM** --- We're solving real-time entity resolution at a scale no one else has cracked — fusing dozens of data sources into a single business identity graph and resolving any entity in milliseconds. It's a graph AI problem, a retrieval problem, and a fraud-modeling problem stacked on top of each other. The technical depth is real. You'd be joining a small team where the data moat is defensible, the research problems are open, and the infrastructure you build becomes load-bearing for businesses. Ownership is real. Velocity is real. There's no layer of process between an idea and shipping it. We're at an inflection point — the graph is built, the match rates speak for themselves, and the hardest problems are still ahead: graph embeddings, fraud propagation models across the business network, real-time traversal at sub-100ms latency, and expanding the identity layer beyond finance into every platform that needs to trust a business. If you want to work on something foundational — the kind of infrastructure that gets built once and everything else runs on top of — this is it. **ABOUT THE ROLE** --- AI agents are beginning to act on behalf of people and businesses against publishers, banks, payment networks, and APIs. Every counterparty today answers identity questions on its own - self-asserted API keys, third-party cookies, pixel trackers. That model breaks the moment the actor is an agent. We're building KYA (Know Your Agent) - a cryptographic identity substrate that replaces self-assertion with third-party-issued credentials, verifiable by any counterparty. We're hiring an engineer to own a meaningful surface of the substrate - issuer mint, edge verification, Passport, or Merkle audit log - and ship it to production. **WHAT YOU'LL DO** --- - Build and maintain the runtime issuer/mint: OAuth Token Exchange (RFC 8693), JWS credentials (RFC 7515/7519, SD-JWT-VC), and Merkle audit log with real-time revocation. - Own and evolve the wire format and claim registry: JWT profile, verification_level/verification_method enums, and eIDAS/NIST IAL/FATF CDD crosswalk. - Implement sub-millisecond JWS verification and Web Bot Auth signature checks (RFC 9421) at the HTTP edge for counterparty CDNs, merchants, and publisher paywalls. - Build and maintain Passport - the user's cloud-resident principal account with canonical handle, KYC/KYB record, authorized-operators list, audit feed, and authenticator binding. - Develop operator integration: embedded KYB onboarding inside first OAuth 2.0 consent, per-operator opt-in, and webhook delivery via Svix. - Work across a Python 3.13 monorepo (FastAPI, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Run, SQLModel/SQLAlchemy) and Go for performance-critical substrate components. **MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS** --- - Shipped systems where cryptographic correctness was load-bearing: OAuth/OIDC IdP, token issuer, signing service, HSM-backed signer, passkey/WebAuthn flow, or similar. - Fluent in Python and Go, or strong in one with a track record of learning the other quickly. - Reads RFCs as primary sources and holds informed opinions on JWK thumbprint canonicalization, pairwise-sub derivation, and Signature-Input header serialization. - Deep understanding of the distinction between identity and authorization, mandate and claim, snapshot and live state. - Production experience with async Python on Postgres, including migration safety and observability. **WHAT SETS YOU APART** --- - Verifiable credentials / SSI / DID work - especially SD-JWT-VC, OID4VC, or the W3C VC stack. - Certificate Transparency, Trillian, or similar append-only-log experience. - KYC/KYB pipeline experience: provider abstraction, evidence retention, eIDAS/FATF CDD level mapping, ownership-chain resolution. - Edge/CDN engineering - Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Envoy filters, or mTLS at the edge. - Familiarity with AP2, x402, MPP, UCP, or Mastercard VI specs and how identity rides alongside mandate. **WORK LOCATION** --- - Based in SF; hybrid 4 days per week in office. **COMPENSATION** --- - ***Salary Range:*** $230,000 – $340,000 + Equity **BENEFITS** --- - ***Time off when you need it:*** Flexible PTO so you can recharge without red tape - ***In-person energy:*** We're based in SF and meet in the office 4 days a week - ***Competitive compensation:*** We pay well and back it with equity. We want you to think and act like an owner - ***Career rocket fuel:*** You'll help build the foundation of a high-growth startup, working side by side with experienced founders and team members who've done it before - ***Benefits on us:*** We cover 100% of your health, dental, and vision premiums. No surprise deductions from your paycheck - ***401(k) with company match***: We match your contributions so your future self benefits too - ***HSA contributions included:*** We contribute to your HSA on applicable plans, so your coverage works as hard as you do - ***Stay healthy, stay sharp:*** A $250 monthly gym stipend to help you bring your best self to work, and everywhere else - ***A seat at the table:*** We believe in transparency, radical candor, and giving every team member a voice 🔥