Join us in building the future of finance.
Our mission is to democratize finance for all. An estimated $124 trillion of assets will be inherited by younger generations in the next two decades. The largest transfer of wealth in human history. If you’re ready to be at the epicenter of this historic cultural and financial shift, keep reading.
About the Role + Team
The Security Engineering team builds the identity and access control plane governing how employees, services, and agentic workloads access Robinhood’s critical infrastructure. We are a platform-building engineering team focused on creating secure, frictionless, and automated self-service access systems at scale.
As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you will shape Robinhood’s foundational identity architecture, define technical strategy, and build Tier-0 access infrastructure used across the entire company! From solving complex authentication and authorization challenges to setting secure guardrails for emerging AI and agentic workflows, your technical leadership will directly impact every product team at Robinhood!
What You'll Do
- Access Control Plane Architecture: Define and build the core technical architecture for managing employee, service, non-human, and agentic access across company-wide resources
- Tier-0 Platform Engineering: Design, build, and operate highly available, resilient, and observable backend identity infrastructure using Go, Python, Rust, or comparable systems languages.
- AuthN & AuthZ Solutions: Implement modern identity protocols and access frameworks (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, RBAC, ABAC, and policy-based access controls).
- AI & Agentic Access Governance: Develop secure access patterns, identity frameworks, governance, and observability guardrails for AI agents, LLM applications, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) systems.
- Self-Service Developer Experience: Create automated, developer-friendly platforms that allow teams to request, approve, provision, and audit access without manual security operations friction.
- Leadership: Set technical direction, author key architectural proposals, mentor engineers across the org, and partner closely with Infrastructure, Data, and Security teams.
What You'll Need
- 8+ years of backend engineering or security platform engineering experience, with a focus on building systems at scale.
- Platform-Builder Expertise: Demonstrated experience designing and building security platforms, access management control planes, or identity infrastructure from the ground up (rather than security operations or third-party tool administration).
- Identity Domain Depth: Strong understanding of core identity primitives, least-privilege access, and protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, or WebAuthn.
- Modern Auth Models: Experience implementing role-based, policy-based, or attribute-based access control models across human and machine workloads.
- AI / Non-Human Workload Exposure: Experience or strong foundational capability in defining security guardrails, access policies, or governance models for AI agents, LLMs, or non-human workloads.
- Systems Architecture: Experience operating and maintaining high-availability, high-throughput Tier-0 infrastructure in cloud-native environments (AWS, Kubernetes).
- Strategic Influence: Proven track record of technical ownership, cross-functional alignment without authority, and driving multi-team initiatives to completion.
Bonus Points
- Background in cryptography, PKI, and certificate lifecycle management.
- Experience implementing zero-trust architectural models.
- Prior experience building identity or authorization platforms within high-growth technology environments.
What we offer
- Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career.
- Performance-driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, equity ownership, and 401(k) matching.
- Best-in-class benefits to fuel your work, including 100% paid health insurance for employees with 90% coverage for dependents.
- Lifestyle wallet — a highly flexible benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more.
- Employer-paid life & disability insurance, fertility benefits, and mental health benefits.
- Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, parental leave, and more!
- Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.
In addition to the base pay range listed below, this role is also eligible for bonus opportunities + equity + benefits.
Base pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. The expected base pay range for this role is based on the location where the work will be performed and is aligned to one of 3 compensation zones. For other locations not listed, compensation can be discussed with your recruiter during the interview process.
Base Pay Range:
Zone 1 (Menlo Park, CA; New York, NY; Bellevue, WA; Washington, DC)
$230,000—$270,000 USD
Zone 2 (Denver, CO; Westlake, TX; Chicago, IL)
$203,000—$238,000 USD
Zone 3 (Lake Mary, FL; Clearwater, FL; Gainesville, FL)
$180,000—$211,000 USD
Click here to learn more about our Total Rewards, which vary by region and entity.
If our mission energizes you and you’re ready to build the future of finance, we look forward to seeing your application.
Robinhood provides equal opportunity for all applicants, offers reasonable accommodations upon request, and complies with applicable equal employment and privacy laws. Inclusion is built into how we hire and work—welcoming different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences so everyone can do their best. Please review the Privacy Policy for your country of application.
