Senior Engineer, Agentic Identity
About the role
ABOUT BASELAYER
Every business in America needs a bank account to exist. The system that decides whether they're real, who's behind them, and whether they're a risk, runs on infrastructure from the 1980s. We're rebuilding that layer from scratch.
Baselayer is the identity layer for institutions across the United States — the most complete business graph in America and every human tied to it. We fuse public records, IRS data, sanctions lists, web signals, and fraud telemetry from 2,200+ financial institutions into a single graph that resolves any business and the humans behind it in milliseconds. The legacy credit bureaus took 50 years to build something that gets 60% match rates. We've built something that gets 98% in under two years.
Today we're trusted by over 20% of financial institutions in America — including FIS, Rho, Socure and leading loan infrastructure providers. But the graph is becoming infrastructure for anyone who needs to know if a business is real and worth trusting: gig platforms, marketplaces, AI companies, and commerce infrastructure at scale.
Trust is the substrate of every financial transaction. We're rebuilding it.
ABOUT THE TEAM
We're solving real-time entity resolution at a scale no one else has cracked — fusing dozens of data sources into a single business identity graph and resolving any entity in milliseconds. It's a graph AI problem, a retrieval problem, and a fraud-modeling problem stacked on top of each other. The technical depth is real.
You'd be joining a small team where the data moat is defensible, the research problems are open, and the infrastructure you build becomes load-bearing for businesses. Ownership is real. Velocity is real. There's no layer of process between an idea and shipping it.
We're at an inflection point — the graph is built, the match rates speak for themselves, and the hardest problems are still ahead: graph embeddings, fraud propagation models across the business network, real-time traversal at sub-100ms latency, and expanding the identity layer beyond finance into every platform that needs to trust a business.
If you want to work on something foundational — the kind of infrastructure that gets built once and everything else runs on top of — this is it.
ABOUT THE ROLE
AI agents are beginning to act on behalf of people and businesses against publishers, banks, payment networks, and APIs. Every counterparty today answers identity questions on its own - self-asserted API keys, third-party cookies, pixel trackers. That model breaks the moment the actor is an agent. We're building KYA (Know Your Agent) - a cryptographic identity substrate that replaces self-assertion with third-party-issued credentials, verifiable by any counterparty. We're hiring an engineer to own a meaningful surface of the substrate - issuer mint, edge verification, Passport, or Merkle audit log - and ship it to production.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build and maintain the runtime issuer/mint: OAuth Token Exchange (RFC 8693), JWS credentials (RFC 7515/7519, SD-JWT-VC), and Merkle audit log with real-time revocation.
- Own and evolve the wire format and claim registry: JWT profile, verification_level/verification_method enums, and eIDAS/NIST IAL/FATF CDD crosswalk.
- Implement sub-millisecond JWS verification and Web Bot Auth signature checks (RFC 9421) at the HTTP edge for counterparty CDNs, merchants, and publisher paywalls.
- Build and maintain Passport - the user's cloud-resident principal account with canonical handle, KYC/KYB record, authorized-operators list, audit feed, and authenticator binding.
- Develop operator integration: embedded KYB onboarding inside first OAuth 2.0 consent, per-operator opt-in, and webhook delivery via Svix.
- Work across a Python 3.13 monorepo (FastAPI, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Run, SQLModel/SQLAlchemy) and Go for performance-critical substrate components.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
- Shipped systems where cryptographic correctness was load-bearing: OAuth/OIDC IdP, token issuer, signing service, HSM-backed signer, passkey/WebAuthn flow, or similar.
- Fluent in Python and Go, or strong in one with a track record of learning the other quickly.
- Reads RFCs as primary sources and holds informed opinions on JWK thumbprint canonicalization, pairwise-sub derivation, and Signature-Input header serialization.
- Deep understanding of the distinction between identity and authorization, mandate and claim, snapshot and live state.
- Production experience with async Python on Postgres, including migration safety and observability.
WHAT SETS YOU APART
- Verifiable credentials / SSI / DID work - especially SD-JWT-VC, OID4VC, or the W3C VC stack.
- Certificate Transparency, Trillian, or similar append-only-log experience.
- KYC/KYB pipeline experience: provider abstraction, evidence retention, eIDAS/FATF CDD level mapping, ownership-chain resolution.
- Edge/CDN engineering - Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Envoy filters, or mTLS at the edge.
- Familiarity with AP2, x402, MPP, UCP, or Mastercard VI specs and how identity rides alongside mandate.
WORK LOCATION
- Based in SF; hybrid 4 days per week in office.
COMPENSATION
- Salary Range: $230,000 – $340,000 + Equity
BENEFITS
- Time off when you need it: Flexible PTO so you can recharge without red tape
- In-person energy: We're based in SF and meet in the office 4 days a week
- Competitive compensation: We pay well and back it with equity. We want you to think and act like an owner
- Career rocket fuel: You'll help build the foundation of a high-growth startup, working side by side with experienced founders and team members who've done it before
- Benefits on us: We cover 100% of your health, dental, and vision premiums. No surprise deductions from your paycheck
- 401(k) with company match: We match your contributions so your future self benefits too
- HSA contributions included: We contribute to your HSA on applicable plans, so your coverage works as hard as you do
- Stay healthy, stay sharp: A $250 monthly gym stipend to help you bring your best self to work, and everywhere else
- A seat at the table: We believe in transparency, radical candor, and giving every team member a voice 🔥
