Lead Software Engineer (Priv Controls)

About the role

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.