Senior Backend Engineer, Customer-Facing R&D

Apono helps organizations securely manage access to cloud infrastructure and applications. Our platform enables teams to implement Just-in-Time and Just-Enough access across cloud environments, databases, Kubernetes clusters, SaaS applications, and other critical resources, reducing security risk without slowing developers down. Trusted by enterprises worldwide, Apono enables engineering and security teams to manage access at scale through identity-aware, policy-driven controls.

Recently acquired by 1Password, we're now building the next generation of secure access for people, systems, and AI agents.

About the Team:

CFRD is a unique team within Apono’s R&D organization that works shoulder-to-shoulder with our Customer Experience teams and customers. Our mission is to directly impact the business by helping close strategic deals, secure renewals, and drive expansion.

The team is highly customer-focused and owns the process end to end, from joining customer calls and understanding their challenges, to gathering requirements, designing and developing the solution, and delivering it to production. We prioritize based on customer and business impact and move quickly to turn real customer needs into scalable product capabilities.

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who is passionate about technology, enjoys learning new domains, and is comfortable working directly with customers.

You’ll engage with Security Architects, DevOps teams, and other technical stakeholders to deeply understand their challenges and requirements. You’ll then take ownership of the solution, from technical design and hands-on development through delivery and customer validation.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who wants to combine deep technical work with direct customer and business impact.

What You'll Do:

• Join customer and prospect conversations to understand their environments, constraints, and what actually blocks them from adopting Apono.
• Translate customer requirements into concrete technical solutions, and present those solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Design, build, and ship backend-heavy features and integrations on fast POC/POV timelines.
• Productize what you build: not just the code, but the configuration, documentation, edge cases, and rollout that turn a successful POC into a scalable, supportable product capability.
• Prioritize your own work based on customer and business impact, in partnership with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Customer Experience, and the rest of R&D.
• Feed what you learn from customers back into the core product and the wider engineering organization.
• Make pragmatic engineering decisions, balancing speed and immediate customer impact with the quality required to run in production.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, primarily in backend development, building production systems used by real customers.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including APIs, distributed systems, data stores, integrations, and system design.
• Strong communication skills: you can run a technical discussion with a customer, ask the right questions, and explain trade-offs in plain language.
• Fast, pragmatic execution. You know when a quick solution is the right one and when it isn't, and you can ship working software under a deadline.
• Strong product sense. You care about how a feature is used, not only how it is built, and can take something from an idea to a polished, shippable solution.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and shifting priorities. You can make scoping decisions independently and defend them.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native environments, including Kubernetes, Docker, and at least one major cloud provider.
• Fluent English, spoken and written. Much of the customer interaction happens with US and European enterprises.

Nice to Have:

• Experience working directly with customers as an engineer, whether in a customer-facing engineering team, Forward Deployed Engineering, a product startup, or another environment where you regularly worked with users.
• Experience with identity and access management, IAM in AWS, GCP, or Azure, or security tooling generally.
• Familiarity with enterprise environments, including SSO, SCIM, Okta or Entra, on-prem and hybrid setups, and the compliance concerns that come with them.
• Experience with Go, Kotlin/JVM, React, or TypeScript.
• Previous exposure to sales-led or POC/POV-driven development cycles.

What Makes This Role Different:

You will see the direct line between what you build and revenue. A customer may be ready to move forward except for one technical blocker, and your team is the one that solves it.

You will own outcomes, not tickets. You’ll work in a small, highly autonomous engineering team, move quickly from customer problem to production solution, and have a direct influence on both customer adoption and the evolution of Apono’s product.

The emphasis here is on strong engineering judgment: understanding what the customer actually needs, choosing the right scope, and shipping a production-quality solution quickly.