About this role
ABOUT BASELAYER
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Every business in America needs a bank account to exist. The system that decides whether they're real, who's behind them, and whether they're a risk, runs on infrastructure from the 1980s. We're rebuilding that layer from scratch.
Baselayer is the identity layer for institutions across the United States: the most complete business graph in America and every human tied to it. We fuse public records, IRS data, sanctions lists, web signals, and fraud telemetry from 2,200+ financial institutions into a single graph that resolves any business and the humans behind it in milliseconds. The legacy credit bureaus took 50 years to build something that gets 60% match rates. We've built something that gets 98% in under two years.
Today we're trusted by over 20% of financial institutions in America including FIS, Rho, Socure and top five US banks. But the graph is becoming infrastructure for anyone who needs to know if a business is real and worth trusting: gig platforms, marketplaces, AI companies, and commerce infrastructure at scale.
Trust is the substrate of every financial transaction. We're rebuilding it.
ABOUT THE TEAM
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AI agents are starting to transact: opening accounts, buying services, moving money on behalf of the businesses and people behind them. Every one of those transactions has a counterparty asking the question banks have always asked: who am I dealing with, and can I trust them? Today's identity infrastructure wasn't built to answer it at agent speed.
The Agentic Economy team is extending Baselayer's business graph into the trust layer for agentic commerce: verifiable credentials that bind an agent to the verified business and human behind it, a registry counterparties can query in real time, and verification APIs that plug into the networks, platforms, and protocols where agent transactions happen.
We run like a startup inside a startup: a small senior team led by our GM of Agentic Economy, working directly with payment networks, banks, wallet providers, and agent platforms. The category is being defined right now; the standards, seats, and infrastructure decisions of the next 18 months will be consequential for a decade.
ABOUT THE ROLE
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AI agents are beginning to act on behalf of people and businesses against publishers, banks, payment networks, and APIs. Every counterparty today answers identity questions on its own - self-asserted API keys, third-party cookies, pixel trackers. That model breaks the moment the actor is an agent. We're building KYA (Know Your Agent) - a cryptographic identity substrate that replaces self-assertion with third-party-issued credentials, verifiable by any counterparty. We're hiring an engineer to own a meaningful surface of the substrate - issuer mint, edge verification, Passport, or Merkle audit log - and ship it to production.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
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- Build and maintain the runtime issuer/mint: OAuth Token Exchange (RFC 8693), JWS credentials (RFC 7515/7519, SD-JWT-VC), and Merkle audit log with real-time revocation.
- Own and evolve the wire format and claim registry: JWT profile, verification_level/verification_method enums, and eIDAS/NIST IAL/FATF CDD crosswalk.
- Implement sub-millisecond JWS verification and Web Bot Auth signature checks (RFC 9421) at the HTTP edge for counterparty CDNs, merchants, and publisher paywalls.
- Build and maintain Passport - the user's cloud-resident principal account with canonical handle, KYC/KYB record, authorized-operators list, audit feed, and authenticator binding.
- Develop operator integration: embedded KYB onboarding inside first OAuth 2.0 consent, per-operator opt-in, and webhook delivery via Svix.
- Work across a Python 3.13 monorepo (FastAPI, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Run, SQLModel/SQLAlchemy) and Go for performance-critical substrate components.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
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- Shipped systems where cryptographic correctness was load-bearing: OAuth/OIDC IdP, token issuer, signing service, HSM-backed signer, passkey/WebAuthn flow, or similar.
- Fluent in Python and Go, or strong in one with a track record of learning the other quickly.
- Reads RFCs as primary sources and holds informed opinions on JWK thumbprint canonicalization, pairwise-sub derivation, and Signature-Input header serialization.
- Deep understanding of the distinction between identity and authorization, mandate and claim, snapshot and live state.
- Production experience with async Python on Postgres, including migration safety and observability.
WHAT SETS YOU APART
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- Verifiable credentials / SSI / DID work - especially SD-JWT-VC, OID4VC, or the W3C VC stack.
- Certificate Transparency, Trillian, or similar append-only-log experience.
- KYC/KYB pipeline experience: provider abstraction, evidence retention, eIDAS/FATF CDD level mapping, ownership-chain resolution.
- Edge/CDN engineering - Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Envoy filters, or mTLS at the edge.
- Familiarity with AP2, x402, MPP, UCP, or Mastercard VI specs and how identity rides alongside mandate.
WORK LOCATION
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- Based in SF; hybrid 4 days per week in office.
COMPENSATION
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- Salary Range: $230,000 – $340,000 + Equity
BENEFITS
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- Time off when you need it: Flexible PTO so you can recharge without red tape
- In-person energy: We're based in SF and meet in the office 4 days a week
- Competitive compensation: We pay well and back it with equity. We want you to think and act like an owner
- Career rocket fuel: You'll help build the foundation of a high-growth startup, working side by side with experienced founders and team members who've done it before
- Benefits on us: We cover 100% of your health, dental, and vision premiums. No surprise deductions from your paycheck
- 401(k) with company match : We match your contributions so your future self benefits too
- HSA contributions included: We contribute to your HSA on applicable plans, so your coverage works as hard as you do
- Stay healthy, stay sharp: A $250 monthly gym stipend to help you bring your best self to work, and everywhere else
- Lunch on us: Lunch stipend so you can stay fueled and focused without thinking about it
- A seat at the table: We believe in transparency, radical candor, and giving every team member a voice 🔥