Hire Me
I am a full-stack product engineer and architect who loves working in identity (CIAM focus), data, developer experience, and open source. I thrive in "bridge" roles where I can learn a system or technology and then bring that understanding to others. I've been able to do that in various ways from engineering and team leadership to in-person instruction to partner relations to systems architecture.
On this page
What I'm looking for
Roles
It's hard to narrow down what I want to do with a title so the following are just guidelines. I am a generalist and am happy wearing multiple hats so if you are looking to fill a role that isn't in the list below but takes advantage of what I can do (see below), please reach out!
- Staff or higher full-stack or backend product engineer
- Staff or higher solution architect
- Partner architecture or engineering
- Product architecture
Required
- A clear salary range and benefits either posted or provided
- 80% remote or higher (maximum one day per week in a Seattle office, occasional offsites are welcome)
- Pacific Time regular working hours (I lean early)
- Net-neutral or better impact on the world
- No ad tech, social networks, user surveillance
- Commitment to diversity
Desired
- 100% remote
- Early or mid-stage company
- Working in the developer experience, identity, or security space
- Net-positive impact on the world
- Giving back, monetarily or otherwise
- A product that does good for the world
Bonus points
- Working on decentralized technology
- Working with open source software
- Opportunity to learn another programming language
- Contribution to the IETF, W3C or another standards organization
What I can do
... and want to keep doing!
CIAM identity
- Primarily focused on OAuth 2, OpenID Connect, SAML
- Design for delegated login systems for multiple applications, devices, and cloud machines
- Integration library (SDK) design and maintenance
- Strategy and implementation of plugins and other extensibility features
- Documentation and training for engineering teams working with these systems
- ✏️ Posts on this topic
Product and solution architecture
- Requirements gathering, validation, and mapping to a delivery plan
- Proof-of-concept design and execution
- Cross-team communication and education
- Collaboration with engineering teams during delivery to support implementation
Partner relations, integrations, and marketplace strategy
- Platform education, architecture support, and engineering for partners
- Product team collaboration to add new extensibility points
- Integration experience and documentation for customers
Application design, build, and maintenance
- JavaScript/TypeScript, PHP, and Ruby languages for browser-based, web, and cloud machines
- Code quality, review, and testing strategies
- Internal and external API design and user experience
- Authentication and authorization strategy
Open source and SDKs
- SDK API and sample application design
- Multi-platform support strategy
- Community and backlog management
- Code quality, clarity, and delivery for examples
- ✏️ Posts on this topic
Engineering team efficiency and operations
- Identification and mitigation of delivery bottlenecks and engineering toil
- Delivery break-down, status reporting, ticket management, and launch planning
- Change management, code review, and backlog refinement
- Hiring process creation and improvement
- ✏️ Posts on this topic
What I've done
The following are projects that I've worked on relevant to the skills above. Note that, unless directly indicated, I was part of a team for the following projects so when I say that I "designed" something, for example, that means that I either lead the design and had external feedback or I was an integral part of the design, not that I did everything. Shout out to all the incredible people I've worked with during my career!
Published the "Federation and Single Sign-On with OpenID Connect" liveProject with Manning Publications (blog post, listing).
Lead an internal tool hardening project after a high-visibility breach, collaborating across several departments to deliver the solution in testable pieces without customer disruption.
Discovery, architecture, and delivery for a data-powered onboarding experience and notification system for enterprise customers, along with documentation for the whole underlying system.
Discovery for an AI-powered Q&A Slack channel for technical sales (repo).
Discovery and architecture for tenant and company-level health check system across customer-facing dashboards and internal tools.
Discovery, architecture, and engineering for a multi-organization, federated authentication system that powered an application for Auth0 partners to submit integrations for review.
Designed and built a creation kit for partner engineering teams to quickly get started creating Auth0 Marketplace integrations (repo).
Lead partner engineering and architecture for the Auth0 Marketplace, which consisted of developing solutions, documentation, and examples to guide partners and working with product teams to add extensibility to the platform (blog post).
Developed and released a major version of the Login by Auth0 WordPress plugin, fixing multiple CVEs and working with large customers to test it ahead of release (release notes, blog post).
Lead a 2-day, in-person training class every month for new technical hires covering OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect flows, application design, and the Auth0 product.
Solo build of an application to collect and display statistics for open-source repos on GitHub to track toil and impact of process changes (repo).
Lead a team of remote engineers building a WordPress PaaS serving 100s of sites for high-value enterprise customers.
What I'd like to know about your company
An incomplete list of what I might ask you during an interview.
- What makes your company a great place to work? How are you working to keep it that way?
- Describe your company culture in 3 words/phrases
- What is the biggest thing holding you back from growing larger?
- How do you decide what to work on, as a company? How does that get communicated to everyone?
- How do you plan out what you're going to do for the next sprint/quarter/year?
- How long does it take for merged code to reach production?
- How do you know how healthy your systems are?
- How do you handle incidents?
- What's your biggest engineering challenge right now?
- What's the process for adding a new language, technology, or platform?
How to get in touch
- Email me at
josh [at] joshcanhelp [dot] com - Add me on LinkedIn