Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management

AlphaSense is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its User Management team, the group that owns identity and access across the whole platform. The role covers all three pillars of that work — creating and provisioning users, authenticating them, and authorizing what they can do — and is open to engineers based in Canada who can work closely with a team in Helsinki. Nearly every product engineering team at AlphaSense depends on this team for user and entitlement data.

About the team

The User Management team owns the full identity lifecycle: user management (creating, provisioning, and managing identities), authentication (verifying who users are), and authorization (determining what they can do). It is a product platform team, not a product team — it builds identity and access infrastructure that other engineering teams build on, rather than shipping user-facing features. It also acts as a security guardrail for AlphaSense, since identity and access sit at the center of how the platform stays secure.

The team is well-established and senior, based in Helsinki. AlphaSense is expanding it into Canada to build follow-the-sun coverage and to push toward a true platform model, scaling authentication and authorization systems so teams across the company can safely self-serve them.

What you will do

• Design, build, and evolve the authorization platform (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC), so teams across the company can answer "what can this user do?"
• Design, build, and evolve the authentication platform across a range of use cases, working closely with the Auth0 integration
• Design, build, and evolve the user management platform — creating, provisioning, and managing user identities and entitlements for the entire customer base
• Partner with security teams to keep authentication, authorization, and user management secure by design and aligned with SOC2 and GDPR requirements
• Design and implement highly scalable systems that keep pace with a growing number of users and customers
• Help define the long-term roadmap across all three domains, not just execute one handed to you
• Build self-service systems and APIs (GraphQL, gRPC, REST) that make authentication, authorization, and user data consumable by product engineering teams
• Drive projects autonomously from Canada while staying aligned with the Helsinki-based team
• Champion strong testing, observability, and reliability practices across the platform

What they are looking for

• Backend: Java 2X, Spring Boot 3.X.X, WebFlux, Maven
• Data and APIs: SQL, GraphQL, gRPC, REST
• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Helm
• Identity and security protocols: RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC; OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and JWT; SAML 2.0 and enterprise SSO federation (assertion validation, signature/encryption handling, IdP- vs. SP-initiated flows); SCIM for user provisioning and deprovisioning
• Engineering practices: event-driven architecture patterns; TDD or a genuine passion for automated testing

The role calls for a genuinely senior, self-sufficient engineer with strong experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms at scale, ideally in a platform engineering context. Someone who helps understand the needs behind a roadmap, shapes it, and drives execution largely autonomously. You should be genuinely interested in security, comfortable partnering with security teams on secure-by-design systems, and comfortable in a distributed, cross-timezone setup.

Nice to have

• Auth0 experience
• SpiceDB / Zanzibar-style authorization system experience
• Apollo Federation
• OpenTelemetry
• Experience operating within SOC2 and/or GDPR-compliant environments

Pay and benefits

The compensation range is CAD 164,450 – 226,550 per year. Final offer amounts depend on factors including candidate experience and expertise. You may also be offered equity and a benefits program.

About AlphaSense

AlphaSense provides market intelligence and search built on AI, used by companies to support decision-making. Its content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients' own research. The company acquired Tegus in 2024. It reports over 6,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500, and was founded in 2011. It is headquartered in New York City with more than 2,000 employees and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland.

AlphaSense is an equal-opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodation to qualified employees with protected disabilities as required by applicable law.