Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access Management Platform
Verkada
San Mateo, CA · $200k–$300k a year · Posted September 2, 2026
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Where San Mateo, CA ranks
Where San Mateo, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living$216k · of 94
- #1Best cities for finance pay after cost of living$162k · of 35
- #1Best cities for HR pay after cost of living$158k · of 15
- #1Best cities for legal pay after cost of living$238k · of 20
- #1Best cities for security pay after cost of living$241k · of 10
- #1Best cities for media and entertainment pay after cost of living$209k · of 9
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $250,000 a year. Across 416 open staff software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $222,500 to $270,000 and the median is $242,500. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 3% above the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Staff Software Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
Who We Are
Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.
We’ve got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation , more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and Verkada is at the center of it.
You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform’s impact in the world. It's the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that’s alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes. We’re rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.
About the Role
As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will shape Verkada's internal access management architecture, define technical strategy, and build the infrastructure used to provision, review, and audit access across the company. From evolving our in-house access platform to setting guardrails for AI-driven and agentic workflows, your technical leadership will directly impact every team at Verkada.
What You'll Do
Own the technical architecture of Verkada's internal access management platform, the system of record for employee, service, and non-human access across company resources.
Design, build, and operate highly available, observable backend infrastructure for access provisioning and review, using modern backend languages and cloud-native tooling.
Extend and harden integrations with identity providers (e.g. Okta) — custom roles, entitlement mapping, and infrastructure-as-code management of identity resources.
Build automation that replaces manual access review and approval workflows, including AI-assisted risk scoring, anomaly detection, and self-service provisioning.
Create automated, developer-friendly tools (including chat-based interfaces) that let teams request, approve, and audit access without manual security operations overhead.
Ensure access controls meet compliance requirements.
Experience in a high-growth startup environment
What You'll Need
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree or equivalent
5+ years of backend engineering or security platform engineering experience
Demonstrated experience designing and building access management platforms or identity infrastructure from the ground up, rather than administering third-party tools.
Strong understanding of identity primitives, least-privilege access, and protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, or SCIM.
Experience implementing role-based, policy-based, or attribute-based access control models.
Experience replacing manual operational workflows with automation, ideally including AI or LLM-driven tooling.
Experience operating high-availability infrastructure in cloud-native environments (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform).
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Bonus Points
Experience with Okta administration and Okta APIs at scale.
Experience building Slack-based or chat-ops tooling for internal workflows.
Prior experience in a regulated or compliance-heavy environment (FedRAMP, SOC 2, ISO 27001).
US Employee Benefits
Verkada is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:
Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well-being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans
Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage
Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options
Expanded mental health support
Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits
Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time
Professional development stipend
Wellness/fitness benefits
Healthy lunches provided daily
Commuter benefits
Additional Information
We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.
Annual Pay Range
At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)
Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).
Estimated Annual Pay Range $200,000 — $300,000 USD
Verkada Is An Equal Opportunity Employer
As an equal opportunity employer, Verkada is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Verkada will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.
Your application will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy .