Engineering Manager, Governance & Access
About the Role
As the Engineering Manager for Governance & Access, you will lead the team responsible for building the security, governance, and access capabilities that let Render's customers manage teams, permissions, and environments with confidence as they scale.
You'll design these capabilities for a world where agents, not just humans, operate on Render, turning emerging agentic use cases into simple, reusable platform primitives across identity, authorization, credentials, and delegation. The problems span traditional IAM and emerging agent infrastructure, which is what distinguishes this role from a typical security or IAM job. You'll shape the team's structure as much as its roadmap. You'll also join at a formative moment: the team is small, the architectural foundations are still being defined, and the systems you build will become primitives used across millions of users.
What You’ll Do
- Lead and grow the Governance & Access team
- Own the roadmap for governance, identity and access management, roles and permissions, and related compliance and security capabilities
- Define how these capabilities extend to agents operating on Render, not only human users
- Partner with the dedicated product and design partners already on the team to align roadmap with customer and platform needs
- Build a strong hiring and interview process as the team scales, calibrating closely with recruiting and cross-functional partners
- Make key technical and architectural decisions for access, identity, and governance systems
- Coach and develop engineers, through performance management and career growth
- Coordinate with the adjacent Security team and the rest of the Growth and Expansion org as the platform evolves
- Balance security, usability, and speed, making pragmatic decisions about where strong guarantees are required and where the team can iterate
What We’re Looking For
- Strong people leadership - the top priority for this role
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, with the flexibility to adapt and grow as the team's scope evolves
- Experience building and scaling a team from an early stage
- A track record of managing and developing engineers, including hiring and performance management
- Ability to partner closely with product and design without needing to fill those functions yourself
- Background from either a startup or a larger company is fine. What matters is the ability to operate at pace
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience in security, governance, or access management (IAM, RBAC, compliance)
- Exposure to building for AI agents or agentic systems
- Experience managing senior (IC5-level) engineers
- Background in developer platforms or B2B SaaS products
This is an opportunity to help define what secure access looks like when software increasingly acts on behalf of people.