Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

About the Team 

Authentication tells you who someone is. Authorization decides what they can do, and doing that well at scale is hard. Role-based access breaks down as applications grow, and AI agents are changing who, and what, asks for access. Auth0 FGA solves this with fine-grained authorization. Its engine is OpenFGA, a CNCF incubating open source project that Okta maintains with contributors from other companies, and Auth0 FGA runs that same engine as a managed service.

FGA DevEx owns how developers experience both: our SDKs, CLI, IDE plugins, Helm charts and docs, all developed in the open. The FGA group owns its product end to end, from infrastructure to docs, so we move quickly and see our work reach developers.

Our guiding principle: one developer experience, many deployment models.

About the role 

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for everything the team owns, and to mentor the senior engineers who build it, starting with our SDKs in Go, JavaScript, .NET, Python, Java and more. From there, you'll shape where the developer experience goes next, from how our SDKs evolve to new surfaces like MCP servers. You'll partner with the Core team on API design, so every new capability feels natural in each language.

This is an individual contributor role. You'll work closely with the engineering manager, who owns people and delivery

Responsibilities

Set the direction:

• Define and drive the technical direction for FGA DevEx across open source and SaaS, and turn it into a roadmap with the engineering manager and the product team.
• Build support for that direction across the team, the FGA group and open source community 
• Mentor the team's senior engineers, and raise the level of everyone around you.
• Establish how a new team builds software, from design reviews and coding standards to how we test and ship, and set the quality bar.
• Make the calls that are hard to undo: when an API is ready to ship across every language, how it evolves, and when to deprecate.
• Be the voice of developer experience across FGA: partner with the Core team on API design and with internal teams such as Integrations, and flag developer friction wherever you see it.

Own the Platform: 

• Architect our SDKs in Go, JavaScript, .NET, Python and Java, including the generator every client is built from.
• Set the standards every SDK follows, from authentication and error handling to retries and rate limiting.
• Shape the tooling and content around the SDKs: the CLI, IDE integrations, Helm charts, GitHub automation, docs and examples.
• Drive the release and versioning strategy across all divisions 
• Grow our open source community: build the contributor and maintainer base beyond the team today, and make it easy for outside developers to contribute.

Requirements

• 8+ years as a software engineer, including time leading the technical direction of a team or a significant area, with or without the title.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Python or Java, and the curiosity to work across several.
• Experience building software other developers use: SDKs, API clients, libraries, developer platforms, CLIs or tooling.
• A strong sense of API design and ergonomics, and of how an interface should feel in different languages.
• Clear communication and a track record of influencing decisions across teams and with outside contributors, without relying on authority.

Nice to have

• Contributing to, maintaining or leading open source projects.
• Building with code generation tools such as OpenAPI Generator and templating frameworks.
• Designing resilient clients: authentication flows, retries and rate limiting.
• Setting up GitHub Actions and release automation.
• Working in authorization or identity, such as OAuth, RBAC or ReBAC.

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