Principal Engineer - Security Foundation

About the role and team

Uber’s Security Engineering team’s mission is to protect, defend, and secure Uber’s products, infrastructure and data by building highly available, scalable and extensible security solutions and services. We are focused on proactively identifying and remediating security risks as well as swiftly detecting and mitigating security incidents. In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, we continuously adapt and evolve our defenses in order to always stay one step ahead of potential threats.

As a passionate and pragmatic technologist, you will lead efforts within the organization to drive the development and operations of security services and frameworks to support user-facing products and platforms across Uber. At Uber, Principal Engineers are among the top 2% of our engineering community—senior technologists who combine vision with execution. They are trusted experts who design at scale, write production-quality code, mentor senior engineers, and set the technical culture across teams.

In this role, you will be the Principal Engineer for Uber's security foundation: the identity and trust layer that every other system depends on. Thousands of services, tens of thousands of employees and partners, and a rapidly growing population of AI agents must each prove who they are and what they are permitted to do — on every request, in every region. You will own the multi-year technical direction for that foundation across our identity-first, Zero Trust stack: workload identity and service-to-service authentication, human and non-human identity, PKI and cryptographic trust, authorization policy, secrets, and device trust. You will set this direction as Uber moves rapidly toward an agentic future, where autonomous agents become first-class actors that must be identified, authorized, attributed, and contained with the same rigor we apply to humans and services, and as the company expands into new business verticals that each bring new trust boundaries, regulators, and partners.

What you’ll do

• Technical Roadmap & Vision: Define and deliver the multi-year architecture and strategy for Uber's identity-first Zero Trust stack, translating company-wide goals into organization, team, and project-level technical direction across multiple engineering organizations.

• Engineer at Core: Design, prototype, and ship secure systems. Stay hands-on in the hardest problems — the architecture you set is one you can build, review, and debug.

• Engineering Excellence: Set and hold the technical bar across the security foundation organization through design review, architectural standards, and written technical direction. Elevate the performance of engineers across organizations through mentorship and sponsorship of staff-and-above ICs.

• Reliability of Tier-0 Trust Infrastructure: Identity, policy decision, and certificate services sit in the critical path of production traffic; their failure is a company-wide failure. Own availability, failure-mode, and blast-radius design for these systems, convert incident learnings into architectural fixes, and govern the safe rollout of enforcement changes.

• Identity for the Agentic Era: Extend the identity and authorization plane to AI agents as first-class principals — agent identity and attestation, delegated authorization and token exchange for agent-to-agent and agent-to-service traffic, risk-adaptive control over agent actions, and runtime attribution of every agent action back to an accountable human or service owner.

• Drive Fleet-Wide Adoption: Lead cross-organization migrations that retire legacy trust primitives — static secrets, long-lived credentials, implicit network trust — in favor of short-lived, attested identity, and see them through to measurable fleet coverage under strict availability constraints.

• Enable New Business Verticals: Ensure the identity foundation extends cleanly to new business lines, acquisitions, cloud estates, and SaaS and partner boundaries, with a consistent model for non-human identity and least privilege.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with infrastructure, AI platform, product engineering, and business teams to integrate security seamlessly, and represent the identity and Zero Trust strategy to executive stakeholders. Influence, not authority, is the instrument.

What you’ll need

• BS Degree in Computer Science or related field.

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering,with deep specialization in cybersecurity.

• Proven track record as a technical leader—driving design, influencing architecture, and mentoring senior engineers across organizational boundaries

• Expert knowledge in one or more of: identity and access management, zero trust architecture, secure systems design, applied cryptography, authorization and policy systems, or agentic/AI security

• Hands-on experience owning highly available, Tier-1 distributed systems in the critical path of production traffic — design, operation, and incident response

• Strong coding skills in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, or Rust

• Experience building scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure at large scale

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Experience designing or operating Zero Trust architectures at scale: SPIFFE/SPIRE or equivalent workload identity, service mesh authentication, centralized policy decision services, device trust, and secretless service-to-service authentication.

• Depth in authentication and authorization protocols: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, SAML, SCIM, mutual TLS, and PKI/certificate lifecycle management.

• Experience securing AI/agentic systems — agent identity, delegated authorization, guardrails, sandbox isolation, or runtime attribution for autonomous workloads.

• Experience with non-human identity at scale: service accounts, API keys, cloud IAM hardening, and credential lifecycle across multi-cloud and SaaS estates.

• Experience leading large-scale credential or authorization migrations across a heterogeneous fleet.

• Contributions to open standards or the external security community (specifications, talks, publications, open source).

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related field.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $302,000 per year - USD $336,000 per year.

For Seattle, WA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $302,000 per year - USD $336,000 per year.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $302,000 per year - USD $336,000 per year.

For all US locations, you will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.

Ready to Ride?

This isn't the kind of place where you follow a playbook — it's where you help write one. If you're driven by impact, energized by challenge, and ready to shape how the world moves — we'd love to hear from you.

You may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and other compensation, as well as a range of benefits. Explore our benefits.

Offices remain key to collaboration and Uber's culture. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Some roles, like those at greenlight hubs, require full-time in-office presence. Ask your Recruiter for details about this role's requirements.

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