Engineering Lead, Identity

About the role

As Engineering Lead for Identity, you own and evolve Seven Education's Identity & Access Management platform. The platform is built on Keycloak and serves more than 10 million users across Europe: schools, teachers, parents, and students who rely on it to access our ecosystem every single day. You combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership, ship code yourself, and shape the architecture of a security-critical system at scale.

What you'll do

• Lead the Identity team, a distributed group of engineers across Europe: run 1:1s, remove blockers, set technical direction, and grow the people on your team.
• Drive the SSO rollout across all our products (Sdui App, Pupil, Fox, Educamos, Additio, Educa) and own the migration from our legacy authentication bridge to the unified Keycloak platform.
• Own the technical architecture of the IAM platform: Keycloak configuration, custom authenticators, identity brokering, and the multi-tenancy model designed for 10M+ users, 50K+ tenants, and 10K concurrent authentications at sub-100ms latency.
• Act as the primary integration partner for product teams adopting centralized IAM: define API contracts, review integrations, and ensure a smooth developer experience.
• Stay hands-on. Write production code, review pull requests, and make pragmatic technical decisions alongside your team.
• Mentor engineers, foster knowledge sharing, and continuously raise engineering standards.
• Collaborate closely with the Director of Domain Engineering to align roadmap, priorities, and cross-team dependencies.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including at least 2 years in an engineering management or technical lead role.
• Strong PHP development skills, including solid knowledge of design patterns, SOLID principles, and clean code practices.
• Production experience with identity, authentication, or authorization systems at scale, including a solid understanding of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and the realities of running multi-tenant, high-availability systems in security-critical domains.
• Experience leading distributed engineering teams and managing stakeholder relationships across functions.
• Fluent English communication skills. German is a plus.

Nice to have

• Hands-on Keycloak experience (configuration, custom authenticators, realm management, identity brokering).
• Familiarity with enterprise identity protocols (SAML, SCIM, LDAP), PHP frameworks like Symfony or Laravel, relational databases (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL), or containerized cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD).

What they offer

• Purpose & Social Impact: contribute to shaping the future of education in Europe, with two paid volunteer days per year.
• Flexibility & Modern Work: flexible working hours, hybrid models, remote work and workations within the EU, Switzerland and the UK.
• Learning & Development: dedicated learning time, access to learning platforms, language courses, and continuous development opportunities.
• 30 days of paid vacation, half-days off on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and dog-friendly offices.