Sr. Software Engineer - Platform Permissions

AppFolio’s Permissions team builds the authorization platform that determines who can do what across all AppFolio products. This role pairs ownership of a critical platform system with the engineering practices and tooling that help other teams move quickly and safely. If you enjoy making access control reliable at scale, shipping changes with confidence, and improving how teams implement permissions across the company, this position is designed for that work.

What you’ll build

• Design, build, and operate the authorization platform, including roles, policies, and access checks that other teams build on top of
• Improve the speed and reliability of permission checks, with clear performance and availability goals as usage grows
• Create interfaces, libraries, and tooling that other engineering teams use to add access control to their features
• Lead migration of older, hard-to-maintain permissions logic onto the modern authorization platform, reducing risk and complexity
• Maintain end-to-end quality for authorization changes through automated testing, controlled rollouts with feature flags, and observability

How you’ll work with others

• Drive technical alignment through design reviews, pragmatic code review, and written proposals that support sound team decisions
• Mentor engineers and share context generously while partnering with product, security, and engineering teams
• Translate ambiguous access-control needs into simple, well-understood systems
• Own safe shipping so authorization updates do not disrupt dependent teams

What you bring

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

Tech focus

• Ruby on Rails, Go, React, TypeScript

Compensation & location

Location: Chicago, IL (onsite).

Salary range: USD 138,400 to 190,300 per year.

The actual base salary for this role will be determined by factors such as skills, education, and experience. Base pay is one component of a Total Rewards package and the listed range does not include additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that may apply.

Benefits eligibility: Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits (see here).

Locations info: Find out more about AppFolio’s locations by visiting their site.