Engineering Manager, Governance & Access

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure. Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users. Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development. We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you. APPLYING TO RENDER We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team. We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed. Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time. 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 experience and ability to operate in a fast-paced environment 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. If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need. BENEFITS - 4 weeks of paid vacation. - 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return. - Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans. - 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well. - Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc. - Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy. - Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders. - Continuous learning benefits & related support. This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship. At Render's discre