Lead Software Engineer (Priv Controls)

Bitwarden is the trusted identity security leader for millions of users worldwide, empowering enterprises, developers, and individuals to securely manage and share sensitive information anywhere. Bitwarden makes it easy for all users to extend robust security across their devices with password management, secrets management, and passwordless and passkey innovations. The company is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. Learn more at bitwarden.com.

As a Lead Software Engineer on Bitwarden’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) team, you will lead the design and development of our next-generation privileged access platform. You'll own critical gateway services, terminal access protocols, and auditing/enforcement at the intersection of security, scalability, and user experience.

In alignment with our modern True Ownership model, our engineers are "T-shaped" professionals who own their services end-to-end—from initial design and secure development to automated testing, deployment, and operational health in production. This role offers unique opportunities to build secure-by-default patterns and make significant contributions to our open-source security ecosystem.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• End-to-End Delivery: Support Bitwarden goals by designing, developing, testing, deploying, and operating secure, performant gateway controls, audited terminal logins, and session recording mechanics for our PAM product line.
• Decoupled Architecture: Maintain strict service boundaries and design resilient APIs that allow the PAM platform to operate as an independent, decoupled tenant on our core platform infrastructure.
• Upstream Collaboration: Partner closely in a co-located, cross-functional "Embedded Trio" (Product, Design, and Engineering) to rapidly design and validate technical solutions prior to code implementation.
• Automated Quality: Eliminate manual testing barriers by building and maintaining robust automated test suites, integration harnesses, and CI/CD pipelines for your team's services.
• Operational Stewardship: Own the operational health, performance, and reliability telemetry of your services in production, proactively participating in sustainable on-call rotations and postmortem analyses.
• Documentation: Build and maintain high-quality internal architecture specifications, API contracts, and external open-source developer documentation.

WHAT YOU BRING TO BITWARDEN

• Overall Experience: 8+ years as a Lead Software Engineer with team lead experience paired with AI assisted development practices, including experience leading a team's technical direction, mentoring senior engineers and being accountable for outcomes you did not implement yourself. Deep system design expertise: you can architect scalable, secure and maintainable systems, evaluate trade-offs across components and services, and guide teams toward sound technical decisions.
• Quality: Experience with JEST or any other unit testing framework. Set the bar in pull request review and own the team's conventions for testing, error handling, API design, and secure coding, keeping automated suites, integration harnesses, and CI/CD pipelines strong enough that manual testing is never the safety net. Maintain the architecture specifications, API contracts, and open source developer documentation that go with them.
• Technical Stack:Strong proficiency and experience in AI-Led Development in C# / .NET, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Security Domain Expertise: Practical experience designing or implementing secure gateway architectures, reverse proxies, and session proxying (SSH, RDP, or HTTPS).
• Identity & Auditing: Understanding of Identity and Access Management, key-rotation protocols, and real-time audit logging systems.
• T-Shaped Engineering Mindset: Practical experience with containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes), automated test frameworks (unit, integration, and end-to-end), and SRE/observability tools (APM, alerting, and telemetry dashboards).
• Secure Coding: Familiarity with zero-trust and zero-knowledge security architectures, encryption standards and threat-modeling methodologies.
• Collaborative Spirit: A highly collaborative and adaptable mindset, excited to work in rapid, outcome-driven feedback loops.
• Open Source Passion: Excitement and enthusiasm for open source, developer advocacy, and building a more secure internet.
• Problem-Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills—valuing written, clear documentation and using data to make technical decisions.

Why Join Us

This is an opportunity to play a foundational role in shaping our India Engineering COE from the ground up. Our user community loves us and we love them. Come to work each day with a sense of purpose as we bring a more secure internet experience to everyone from our friends and family to the world’s largest organizations.

Become an expert. You’ll get immersed in the prominent technology markets of security and open source software. You'll work alongside talented global teams, solve meaningful engineering challenges, influence how we scale our engineering organization & contribute to products used by customers around the world.

If you're passionate about building exceptional teams, enabling engineering excellence, and making a lasting impact within a fast-growing engineering company, we'd love to hear from you.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where everyone can do their best work. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and make employment decisions based on skills, experience, qualifications, and business needs.