Staff Data Platform Software Engineer - veza

Company Description

Veza is the pioneer in identity security, purpose-built to answer the fundamental question enterprises face: who can and should take what action on what data. Veza's Access Graph platform maps an organization's entire identity ecosystem across users, groups, roles, policies, permissions, and resources providing deep visibility and control over human, non-human, and agentic identities across SaaS, cloud, on-prem, and custom applications. With over 30 billion access permissions under management, global enterprises including Blackstone, Expedia, and Wynn Resorts trust Veza to manage privileged access monitoring, non-human identity security, access entitlement management, and next-generation identity governance.

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Veza is now part of the ServiceNow family, with the acquisition closing in March 2026. The combination brings together Veza's AI-native Access Graph with ServiceNow's AI Control Tower and agentic workflows, enabling organizations to enforce end-to-end identity security rooted in the principle of least privilege across applications, data, cloud environments, and AI agents. For engineers joining Veza today, this means the scale and resources of an enterprise platform company, with the product velocity and mission-driven focus of a security innovator at a pivotal moment in the industry.

Job Description

We are looking for a passionate Staff Software Engineer to join Veza's Graph Data Platform team. You will play a key role in designing, improving, and maintaining the robust and scalable code behind the Veza Access Graph, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams to shape the future of our products and deliver exceptional identity and access management experiences to our customers. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the growth and success of a high-impact team while working on cutting-edge technologies.

What You Will Do

Technical Leadership

Act as the technical expert for the Veza Access Graph, identifying broad challenges — technical, functional, or business — and parsing them into initiatives the org can execute against

Solve complex problems with no established precedent in the org or the field, from architecture through implementation

Serve as the dependable subject-matter expert (SME) for your area; define coding standards and engineering best practices for the team

Identify opportunities to simplify systems, reduce redundancy, and drive large-scale simplification across the platform

Deliver significant direct technical contributions while independently driving workstream-level design reviews

Set the bar for code quality, testing, documentation, and support — and share best practices with teammates in a consumable format

Roadmap & Execution

Set roadmap and prioritization for workstreams in your area; drive planning, design, and delegation of key components to ICs and stakeholders

Identify gaps, dependencies, and unresolved problems; partner with customers and stakeholders to close them

Proactively refine technical requirements in alignment with key stakeholders

Operate autonomously, consistently delivering high-quality work on time

Collaboration & Mentorship

Break complex roadmaps into clear workstreams, milestones, and timelines, driving alignment and buy-in across PMs, TPMs, EMs, TLs, ICs, and dependency teams

Represent your team's roadmap and dependencies in company-wide initiatives

Coach and mentor team leads and ICs; help define interview loops, identify talent gaps, and build coaching plans to close them

Drive collaboration, conflict resolution, and stakeholder buy-in to unblock projects and ensure successful delivery

Model ServiceNow's core values and contribute feedback to improve team culture

Qualifications

10+ years of professional backend software development experience, with a focus on scalable distributed systems, data management, identity, security, or related domains

Distributed systems fundamentals — consistency models, partitioning/sharding, replication, consensus, failure modes at scale

Graph database internals — traversal algorithms, query planning/optimization, indexing strategies (not just querying an existing graph API)

Go at a systems-programming level — concurrency patterns, memory/performance tuning, and production experience building and testing backend services

Large-scale data modeling — schema design for graphs handling high cardinality/fan-out

Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs in microservice architectures

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization / orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

Familiarity with caching mechanisms in distributed systems

Track record of technical decisions with org-wide blast radius — not just execution within an assigned mandate

Experience setting technical direction or standards adopted by multiple teams

Systems design for correctness and rollback safety in high-stakes infrastructure (access/identity data qualifies)

Fluency with AI-assisted engineering — using LLM-based tools (Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate design exploration, code review, debugging, and documentation, while knowing when to trust generated output versus verifying it against source, tests, or runtime behavior

Nice to have:

Storage engine or query engine experience — having built or deeply modified one (Neo4j internals or a comparable engine)

Deep knowledge of relational algebra and graph algorithms, with experience across OLTP and OLAP systems

Track record of using AI tools to multiply personal and team output on complex, large-codebase work — beyond autocomplete-level usage

Identity and access management concepts (RBAC/ABAC, permission graphs, entitlement modeling)

Security or compliance-adjacent engineering background

Graduate degree

You Are:

A rigorous problem-solver who instinctively verifies assumptions rather than guessing — you dig into logs, code, and system behavior before proposing a fix, and you're comfortable being wrong in public if it gets the team to the right answer faster.

Someone who thrives with ambiguity: you can take a vague mandate ("make the graph queries faster," "harden this for scale") and turn it into a scoped plan with clear tradeoffs, then execute it independently — while knowing exactly when to loop others in.

A systems thinker who considers blast radius and reversibility before making changes to critical infrastructure — especially in a domain like ours, where a subtle bug in the access graph has real security consequences.

A strong communicator who can exp