Sr. Software Engineer - Platform Permissions

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Permissions team and help build an authorization platform that determines who can do what across all AppFolio products. This role centers on fast, reliable, and dependable access control systems, including the safe migration of older permissions logic and end-to-end quality practices for authorization changes.

Role summary

You will design and deliver the platform capabilities other engineering teams rely on, including roles, policies, and access checks. The focus is on improving performance and availability as usage grows, while providing the interfaces, libraries, and tooling that make it easier for teams to add access control to their features quickly and safely.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the authorization platform, including roles, policies, and access checks used by other teams
• Improve the speed and reliability of permission checks, establishing performance and availability goals to keep them strong at scale
• Build interfaces, libraries, and tooling that enable other engineers to add access control to their features with speed and safety
• Lead migration of older, hard-to-maintain permissions logic onto the modern authorization platform, reducing risk and complexity during the transition
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, pragmatic code review, and written proposals that support strong shared decision-making
• Mentor engineers and share context, partnering with product, security, and engineering teams to turn unclear access-control needs into simple, well-understood systems
• Own end-to-end quality through automated testing, controlled rollouts using feature flags, and observability, helping authorization changes ship safely

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Fluency with AI coding agents, including experience with any available agents, understanding common concepts, and a willingness to learn and apply AI for building
• Depth in Ruby on Rails, Go, or React with TypeScript, or the ability and desire to become effective in them quickly
• A track record of designing and owning non-trivial platform systems end-to-end

Technology

• Ruby on Rails
• Go
• React
• TypeScript

Compensation & benefits

• Base salary range: $138,400 - $190,300 per year
• Actual base salary will be determined by factors including skills, education, and experience
• Base pay is one component of a Total Rewards package, and the range does not include additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that may apply
• Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits (see here)

Location

Onsite in Chicago, IL. Find out more about AppFolio locations by visiting their site.