VAST Data is looking to add a Senior Software Engineer – Authentication & Authorization to our growing team!This is a unique opportunity to join one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies in history—at the heart of the AI revolution.“VAST’s data management vision is the future of the market.” – ForbesAt VAST, we’re building the data platform for the AI era—software infrastructure that powers the capture, refinement, protection, and activation of massive datasets across data center, edge, and cloud. Our platform is redefining what’s possible in high-performance, scalable data systems, and we’re just getting started.About the Role:We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to build high-performance authentication and authorization services for a large-scale distributed storage system. You'll design and implement systems that make authorization decisions on the critical path of storage requests, balancing low latency, correctness, and scalability while integrating efficiently with external AAA services.This is a systems engineering role. You'll work in modern C/C++ on Linux, own features end-to-end, and solve production problems that only emerge at scale. The systems you build will handle demanding enterprise workloads where correctness, observability, and performance are equally important.If you enjoy understanding systems deeply, debugging complex production behavior, and taking ownership of critical infrastructure, you'll fit well on this team.What You'll DoDesign and implement authentication and authorization services in C/C++Integrate efficiently with external AAA services and their wire protocolsBuild low-latency, highly scalable authorization paths for distributed storage workloadsOwn features from requirements and design through implementation, testing, rollout, and production supportDebug complex production issues using traces, metrics, and logsOptimize performance, scalability, and resource utilization under realistic workloadsImprove the observability, reliability, and maintainability of the systemWork directly on problems encountered by enterprise customers and AI infrastructure deploymentsWhat You Won't Be DoingBuilding features that never reach productionWorking on isolated prototypes with little customer impactSpending your time in unnecessary meetings instead of engineeringResponsibilitiesMake sound technical decisions around access control APIs, external AAA integration, caching strategies, correctness, performance, and operabilityOwn significant areas of the codebase and drive their technical directionTurn ambiguous requirements into well-designed, production-ready solutionsMaintain a high engineering bar for code quality, testing, and operational excellenceWrite software that remains reliable under concurrency, retries, failover, and large-scale production workloadsImprove the simplicity, observability, and maintainability of the system over time