Identity & Access Management (IAM) Engineer

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customersuccess with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands. Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $100m in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud - managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

Role Overview

The Identity & Access Management (IAM) Engineer designs, implements, and operates identity and access capabilities for human users, non-human identities, workloads, devices, services, and AI agents. The role focuses on the subject side of access control—identity, authentication, roles, groups, entitlements, and privileges—with an emphasis on least privilege, separation of duties, strong authentication, automated lifecycle management, and short-lived credentials.

The engineer partners with others across the organization to ensure applications, infrastructure, and services appropriately mediate access, separate security domains, minimize unnecessary sharing, and limit common mechanisms that could increase privilege or blast radius.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and operate authentication, authorization, federation, SSO, MFA, RBAC/ABAC, PAM, conditional access, policy-based authorization, just-in-time access, continuous verification, and privileged-access capabilities.
• Engineer roles, groups, entitlements, and privilege assignments around least privilege and separation of duties.
• Automate identity provisioning, access reviews, privilege changes, revocation, and deprovisioning.
• Implement phishing-resistant MFA, cryptographically bound authentication, and strong identity assurance across enrollment, authentication, federation, and recovery.
• Govern service accounts, machine and device identities, workloads, automated processes, APIs, and AI-agent identities.
• Implement short-lived workload and agent identities using federation, certificates, and modern workload-identity approaches while reducing reliance on persistent secrets.
• Partner with architects, engineers, and resource owners to ensure access is efficiently mediated and designs minimize excessive privilege, unnecessary sharing, and cross-domain exposure.
• Monitor identity posture and partner with Security Operations to investigate identity threats and rapidly revoke compromised access.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience engineering enterprise IAM systems and integrations.
• Strong knowledge of authentication, authorization, federation, identity lifecycle management, role/group design, separation of duties, and least privilege.
• Knowledge of phishing-resistant MFA, cryptographic authentication, identity proofing, federation, and modern identity assurance practices.
• Experience managing human and non-human identities, including service, machine, workload, or device identities.
• Experience automating identity processes using APIs, scripting, or Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Understanding of PKI, secrets management, short-lived credentials, workload identity federation, and technologies such as OIDC, OAuth, and SPIFFE/SPIRE.
• Ability to reason about identity and authorization across distributed systems and collaborate with architects and engineers on secure access design.

Backblaze Perks: 

• Healthcare for family, including dental and vision
• Competitive compensation and 401K  
• RSU grants for full-time employees 
• ESPP program  
• Flexible vacation policy 
• Maternity & paternity leave 
• MacBook Pro to use for work plus a generous stipend to personalize your  workstation 
• Childcare bonus (human children only) 
• Fertility treatment and support 
• Learning & development program 
• Commuter benefits 
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance 

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base pay range for this position is $155,000 - $195,000

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries, but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.