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. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, Teleport operates globally, with industry-leading customers such as Nasdaq, IBM, Doordash, and Elastic.

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. First, non-human, machine, and AI identities now outnumber human ones, driving massive secrets sprawl while worsening anonymity. Second, 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. Third, 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

Interview Process

You will join 30 minute intro call and we will walk you through the compensation, interview process and requirements
You join a Slack channel and submit a coding challenge in Go using Github

The Benefits

While many companies flaunt their benefits and perks to convince you to join their company, we believe your career is more important than that. That’s why we focus on making your day-to-day the best it can be while empowering you to achieve your goals and aspirations.

What does that mean?

It means you’ll have the autonomy to make your own decisions and focus on what’s important to you and your role.
It means having access to a senior team that supports you and wants to see you succeed.
You’ll have a smart team you can learn from, collaborate with, and grow with.
It means being able to make an impact and have a voice in the future of the feature, product or company direction. We don’t just leave you to focus on a niche. We allow you to spread your wings and take advantage of opportunities, challenging projects and exciting problems.
It means removing the bureaucracy and red tape that stifles innovation while giving you access to all the information you need to build and take action more quickly.
It means allowing you to have the career you’ve always wanted today, rather than having to “earn your stripes” and wait for the right moment. If you’re good enough, you’re good enough.

But we don’t stop there.

In addition to the career opportunities at Teleport, we offer a whole range of benefits that help you to maximize your future, including:

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?

Get to use (and know) Teleport through our unique interview process

At Teleport, we do things a bit differently. And when we say we only hire top talent, we actually mean it. Because of this, our interview process is different too - and we’re proud of it. We let your work do the talking. We don’t go in for six rounds of interviews, live whiteboard or live-coding. We don’t hire people that can talk a good game. We only want the best. And for that, we need to see what you can do, in your own time, in your own way. For real.

But interviews are a two-way street. Through the project, you’ll get a real taste of life at Teleport, including:

We’re flexible - you’ll have plenty of time to complete your project, if life gets in the way, that’s ok. We can - work around you.
We give you autonomy - you’ll have the space and freedom to figure things out, make decisions, and problem-solve.
We’re collaborative - Got questions?
We have answers. You’ll have support from your team - the one you’ll be working with day in day out if you’re successful in getting the role.
We progress careers - During the project, see how much you learn. That’s what working at Teleport is like. We like learning, on the job. All-the-time.
We can move fast (if you can) - two weeks sound like a long time? No problem? Early submissions are fine, and we’ll keep the process moving.

Think you’ve got what it takes? We’d love to see it! Unconvinced? We can guarantee three things:

It’ll challenge you.
You'll learn a lot.
If you love the process, you'll love working at Teleport.

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.

Candidate Privacy Notice: For information about our collection and processing of job applicant personal data for this position, please see our Job Applicant Privacy Policy and Notice of Collection at https://goteleport.com/legal/apply/job-applicant/

Senior Software Engineer - Machine & Workload Identity