Director of Software Engineering, Agentic Architecture & Protocol Standards

What you'll do

• Set the technical direction and engineering roadmap for agent identity, delegated authorization, and cross-protocol security.
• Lead technical contributions to industry standards-setting organizations by translating requirements into specification proposals.
• Develop reference architectures and implementations for agent identity, customer intent, and policy decisions.
• Engineer patterns for bounded delegation, authority attenuation, revocation, and enforcement at service boundaries.
• Evaluate agent and tool protocols through prototypes, interoperability tests, and threat models.
• Connect agent interactions with payment authentication, merchant assurance, and issuer authorization.
• Partner with product architects to develop reusable components and interface contracts.
• Lead cross-functional technical delivery while mentoring technologists and maintaining standards traceability.

What we're looking for

• Formal training or certification in software engineering concepts.
• 10+ years of applied experience in software engineering.
• 5+ years of experience leading technologists to solve complex technical challenges.
• Deep experience in authorization, identity protocols, distributed systems security, or secure service architecture.
• Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, token security, workload identity, least privilege, and policy enforcement.
• Practical experience engineering delegated-access, service-to-service, tool-integration, or AI-agent systems.
• Experience threat modeling impersonation, excessive authority, confused-deputy behavior, and misuse across trust boundaries.
• Experience with MCP, Financial-grade API profiles, sender-constrained tokens, SPIFFE, or workload identity standards (preferred).