Lead Software Engineer (Secrets Manager & AI Identity)

About Bitwarden

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 with team members located across the globe. Learn more at bitwarden.com.

The Role

As a Lead Software Engineer on Bitwarden’s Secrets Manager team, you will lead the design and development of the Secrets Manager application stack that lets developers, DevOps, and cybersecurity teams alike centrally store, manage, and deploy sensitive credentials. You'll own the core concepts of secrets, projects, machine accounts, and access tokens across the product suite.

Secrets Manager spans a .NET API, a Rust SDK core, and a TypeScript and Angular web client, with SDK bindings in eight further languages and integrations written in Go, C++, Java, PHP and Python. You should be comfortable moving between languages and learning new ones as the work demands, developing deep expertise as you go.

This Lead Software Engineer role is hands-on and does not carry any expectations for people management. You'll stay close to the code while driving architecture, technical direction, and complex, high-impact engineering problems. As our India Product Engineering organization grows, you'll help shape its engineering practices and also navigate opportunities to mentor and elevate other engineers through technical leadership.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• End-to-End Delivery & Ownership: Design, build, test, deploy, and operate secure, performant applications across the Secrets Manager suite. You are accountable for these services end to end, including the parts you did not personally write.
• Engineering Standards and Automated Quality: 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.
• Decoupled Architecture and Service Boundaries: Maintain clean service boundaries and design resilient APIs so Secrets Manager can evolve independently of the core platform. Own the medium-term technical direction and record the reasoning behind significant decisions.
• Technical Mentorship: Grow the engineers around you. Pair on hard problems, give substantive design feedback, and mentor them to grow,
• Codebase Health: Contribute to performance, reliability, accessibility, and maintainability. Identify technical debt, articulate its cost, and sequence pragmatic refactoring alongside delivery.
• Operational Stewardship: Own the operational health, performance, and reliability telemetry of your services in production.
• Cross-Functional Partnership & Collaboration: Partner closely with Product, Design, Security, and the other team's engineers to design and validate solutions before implementation begins.

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.
• Technical Stack - Expertise: Expertise in C# / .NET, with strong working proficiency in Rust or TypeScript / Angular and willingness to build depth in the other. As a lead, you'll shape how the team adopts AI-assisted development: what gets automated, what stays human-reviewed, and how we hold the quality and provenance bar as output volume rises.
• Migration Judgement: A track record of running incremental modernization inside a live codebase, such as framework upgrades, strict-typing rollouts or state-management migrations, without halting feature delivery or fragmenting the codebase into two competing styles.
• Technical Stack - Experience:
• Entity Framework with implementations of Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite
• Languages such as Go and Python
• Tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, and GitHub Actions
• Containerized environments such as Kubernetes
• Writing, consuming, and using SDKs / APIs
• AI-assisted development preferable Claude Code
• Technical Stack - Familiarity:
• Languages such as C++, Java, PHP
• WASM instruction format
• 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?

• 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.
• We are dedicated to building a diverse and talented team. Work remotely with motivated and supportive team members across the world.
• Learn and grow. Take on new challenges with the support of your team, and join our #growth-club to continue personal and professional development.

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.

If you enjoy being hands-on, solving hard engineering problems, and having a genuine influence on how products are built, we'd love to hear from you.