R&D Lead
1Kosmos is an identity security company providing a platform for identity verification, passwordless authentication, and reverification across the user lifecycle. It serves workforce, consumer, and citizen identity use cases, helping organizations securely onboard and authenticate users while protecting personal data.
Funding
Projects
About 1Kosmos
1Kosmos offers a single platform that verifies identity at onboarding, enables passwordless authentication across systems, and reverifies users when risk changes, all built with government-grade security. Its privacy-first, decentralized architecture ensures user identity data stays with the user rather than being centrally stored or monetized, using verified biometrics and user-controlled, reusable decentralized credentials. The company serves workforce identity (employee onboarding and authentication), customer identity (consumer onboarding and fraud prevention), and citizen identity (secure access to government services) use cases, with clients such as Concentrix deploying passwordless authentication across hundreds of thousands of users. 1Kosmos integrates with existing enterprise systems like ServiceNow via pre-built integrations and APIs, and has been recognized by analyst firms including Gartner and KuppingerCole as a leader in identity verification and passwordless authentication.
Skills
About the Role
You will spearhead technology discovery, applied research, and technical innovation across backend, APIs, web, mobile, cloud, and emerging platforms. You will identify, validate, and de-risk new technologies and enable their transition into product engineering teams. While you won't own day-to-day product engineering or feature delivery, you will work closely with Product Engineering to influence future platforms and architectures. You'll lead cross-functional research initiatives, drive proof-of-concept and spike solutions, and act as a technical thought leader shaping long-term architecture and build-vs-buy decisions, all while ensuring research outcomes meet security, quality, and compliance standards.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience in R&D, applied research, platform engineering, or innovation leadership
- Proven experience leading cross-functional technical research teams and exploratory initiatives
- Strong background in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and modern application stacks
- Demonstrated ability to translate research and experimentation into production-adoptable solutions
- Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills
- Experience managing multiple concurrent research tracks with varying levels of maturity
- Deep understanding of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Ability to review, guide, and influence production-level code without being the primary implementer
- Strong architectural judgment with a security-first mindset
- Experience establishing R&D best practices, including experimentation frameworks and technical evaluation criteria
- Familiarity with DevSecOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, and secure software supply chains
- Hands-on expertise in one or more of: Java, Node.js, Go (Golang), C / C++, JavaScript / TypeScript
- Experience with containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
- Exposure to identity, security, cryptography, or authentication technologies
Responsibilities
- Lead technology research and discovery initiatives across backend systems, APIs, web, mobile, cloud, and emerging domains
- Identify, evaluate, and prototype emerging technologies, tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns relevant to the strategic roadmap
- Drive proof-of-concept (PoC), spike solutions, and experimental platforms to validate feasibility, scalability, security, and performance
- Establish a structured research to validation to handoff model to transition successful innovations to Product Engineering teams
- Act as a technical thought leader, influencing long-term architecture, platform evolution, and build-vs-buy decisions
- Partner with Product Management, Product Engineering, Security, and QA teams to ensure research outcomes align with business and compliance needs
- Ensure research outcomes adhere to security, quality, regulatory, and compliance standards from inception
- Track industry trends, academic research, open-source ecosystems, and startup innovations to maintain a competitive technology edge
- Define success metrics for R&D initiatives and regularly communicate outcomes to executive stakeholders