Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Bestow is a vertical technology platform that provides infrastructure for life insurers. The Engineering Manager for IAM will lead a team building scalable identity and access management services for enterprise customers while remaining hands-on in system design and production coding. The role also includes team development, operational ownership, stakeholder partnership, delivery management, and AI adoption.
Responsibilities
- Stay in the code and actively participate in system design and architecture decisions
- Review pull requests regularly, with feedback that raises the bar on code quality
- Own your team's quality standards: test coverage, documentation, code review practice, and the automation and quality gates that keep defects out of production
- Debug and troubleshoot alongside your engineers, and lead the team through hard diagnostic work
- Identify technical debt, build a remediation plan for it, and advocate for the time to do it
- Lead the evolution of our authorization model to support multi-tenant enterprise customers at scale
- Architect the separation of authentication and authorization so each can scale, cache, and enforce policy independently across enterprise partnerships
- Design a token strategy that balances security, partner flexibility, and platform cost, and manage the vendor relationships that go with it
- Build automated user provisioning and de-provisioning so partner onboarding does not require engineering work
- Solve for partner-specific requirements such as biometric re-authentication, extended session lifetimes, layered access policies, and regulatory audit needs
- The IAM team shares a weekly on-call rotation covering authentication and authorization services, and this role takes a regular turn in it alongside the engineers on the team. We treat rotation health as a first class part of the job: right sized alerting, current runbooks, and following through on the operational fixes that keep the load predictable
- You will own the observability, monitoring, and alerting for your services, track uptime and incident metrics, and lead incident response when it is your team's service
- Recruit, interview, and hire engineers for your team, and partner closely with Talent Acquisition on pipeline and calibration
- Own the onboarding experience for new engineers, including current documentation and thoughtful 30, 60, and 90 day plans
- Hold regular 1:1s focused on growth, and build individual development plans tied to what each engineer actually wants from their career
- Coach engineers on both technical and professional skills, and find them stretch assignments that move them forward
- Build an inclusive team where people trust each other enough to disagree productively, and address team conflict directly when it comes up
- Set clear, measurable expectations, give documented and actionable feedback, and run fair performance reviews with unambiguous outcomes
- Address underperformance with both empathy and urgency, and raise it early rather than late
- Translate product requirements into technical plans, estimate your team's capacity and timelines honestly, and deliver against those estimates
- Own a realistic team roadmap and make the daily prioritization calls that keep it real
- Track your team's delivery metrics, report on them in the monthly operating review, and come with a plan when something dips
- Set a technical north star for IAM that your team can make decisions against, and execute toward it incrementally rather than in one big bet
- Translate company strategy into team-level work through RFCs, PRD input, and well-scoped tickets
- Communicate status, progress, and risk to stakeholders early and transparently, and escalate with a proposed solution attached
- Explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including senior leadership and external partners
- Connect your team's work to business outcomes and make cost and benefit trade-offs explicit
- Model effective use of AI coding tools and set the standard for how agent generated changes get reviewed, tested, and attributed
- Level up your team's AI practice through hands-on workshops, shared prompting patterns, and continuous iteration on the team's approach
- Ensure the team follows security and quality best practices for AI tool usage
- Create room for experimentation and calculated risk, and treat failed experiments as learning the team talks about openly
Skills
- 8+ years of professional software experience, including 1+ years directly managing a team of Software Engineers while staying hands-on in the code
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
- Professional experience with Go, or another statically typed backend language with a clear path to Go
- Production experience with cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes or a comparable container orchestration platform
- Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, comfortable writing ANSI SQL
- Experience designing modern distributed systems and APIs, including Docker for local development and tools such as Protocol Buffers, OpenAPI, or Swagger
- Lead with an end-to-end ownership mentality, combining high organizational standards with excellent communication to build, retain, and empower high-performing engineering teams
- Deep understanding of the full software development lifecycle, from feature inception through system maintenance, continuous integration, and release strategy
- Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools on a production codebase
- Track key metrics and consistently meet established Service Level Agreements
- Break down ambiguous technical problems and identify areas of risk early
- Able to pick up and ship work in the team's codebases when the team needs it
- This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is open to remote candidates within the United States
- Hands-on experience with Auth0, Okta, or a similar platform, including tenant and organization configuration, connection management, and custom logic such as Rules or Actions
- Working knowledge of OAuth flows, OpenID Connect, token types, JWT validation, and token lifecycle concerns like caching, rotation, and revocation
- Designing authentication systems with tenant isolation, partner-specific branding, SSO configuration, and audit logging that holds up in a regulated industry
- RBAC, ABAC, or policy-based access control, and experience separating authentication from authorization
- Integrating SAML 2.0 and OIDC connections for B2B partnerships, and SCIM for automated provisioning
- Claude Code is the standard at Bestow and direct experience with it is preferred; comparable experience with tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot transfers well
Benefits
- Equity based on role
- Flexible paid time off
- Parental leave programs
- 100% paid-premium option for medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Lifestyle stipend to support your physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing
- Flexible work-from-home policy
- Remote and WFH options
- Access to a state-of-the-art office in Dallas' Deep Ellum for those who prefer an office setting
- Employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives
Company Overview