Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management

About AlphaSense: The world’s most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research content. The acquisition of Tegus by AlphaSense in 2024 advances our shared mission to empower professionals to make smarter decisions through AI-driven market intelligence. Together, AlphaSense and Tegus will accelerate growth, innovation, and content expansion, with complementary product and content capabilities that enable users to unearth even more comprehensive insights from thousands of content sets. Our platform is trusted by over 6,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with more than 2,000 employees across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland. Come join us! About the Team: The User Management team owns the full identity lifecycle at AlphaSense — from creating and provisioning users, through managing their identities, to authenticating who they are and authorizing what they can do in the system. Our work spans three core domains: User Management — creating, provisioning, and managing user identities Authentication — verifying who users are Authorization — determining what users can do in the system We are a product platform team, not a product team: we build the identity and access infrastructure that other engineering teams build on top of, rather than shipping user-facing features ourselves. We also act 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, Finland. We're now expanding into Canada to build follow-the-sun coverage, so our customers get proper support around the clock, and to push deliberately toward a true platform model — scaling our authentication and authorization systems so they can be safely self-served by teams across the company. About the Role: This is a Staff Engineer role on the team that manages identity and access for AlphaSense's entire, and constantly growing, customer base, and that nearly every product engineering team depends on for user and entitlement data. You'll work across all three pillars of identity: creating and managing users, authenticating them, and authorizing what they can do — designing systems built to scale with a constantly growing number of users. Security is core to this role, not adjacent to it — you'll work closely with our security teams to make sure what we build is secure by design, in an environment governed by SOC2 and GDPR. We're looking for a genuinely senior, self-sufficient engineer with strong experience building and operating identity, authentication, or authorization platforms at scale, ideally in a platform/product-platform engineering context. This is someone who doesn't just execute a roadmap, but helps understand the needs behind it, shapes it, and then drives execution — largely autonomously, and in close collaboration with our core team based in Helsinki. You're genuinely interested in security, comfortable partnering closely with security teams on secure-by-design systems, and comfortable working in a distributed, cross-timezone setup — based in Canada, collaborating closely with a Helsinki-based team. Who You Are: Backend: Java 2X, Spring Boot 3.X.X, WebFlux, Maven Data & APIs: SQL, GraphQL, gRPC, REST Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Helm Identity & 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 [Nice to Have] Auth0 experience SpiceDB / Zanzibar-style authorization system experience Apollo Federation OpenTelemetry Experience operating within SOC2 and/or GDPR-compliant environments What You’ll Do: This role spans all three pillars of our identity platform in equal measure — this is not an authorization-only or authentication-only role. Design, build, and evolve our authoriza