Will Barnette

About Will Barnette

I am a Staff Security Software Engineer focused on building and scaling enterprise access management and authorization platforms. My work centers on designing secure, reliable systems that control production access, enforce policy boundaries, and propagate permissions across distributed infrastructure. I have led company-wide efforts to centralize and modernize production access controls, serving as DRI for platforms responsible for managing and enforcing access across critical systems. I design authorization enforcement layers, implement edge-based policy evaluation, and ensure consistent permission propagation using signed tokens and structured access models. I re-architected legacy BeyondCorp-style access controls into cloud-native enforcement systems by migrating authorization logic out of monolithic proxy infrastructure and into Go-based services with edge enforcement using Cloudflare Zero Trust. This enabled coarse-grained authorization at the edge, permission-aware request handling, and scalable JWT-based access propagation.In parallel, I design operational governance and risk frameworks that bring structure to access management at scale. This includes improving visibility into ownership, defining control boundaries, documenting operational processes, and identifying failure modes that impact authorization workflows and dependent systems. I focus on translating reliability and security events into durable architectural and policy improvements that strengthen least-privilege enforcement across the organization.My background combines software engineering, reliability engineering, and security platform design. I specialize in authorization systems, production access management, OIDC integrations, policy enforcement, distributed systems, and incident leadership within high-impact infrastructure environments. I am most interested in roles that involve building and evolving access control platforms, authorization systems, and secure policy enforcement mechanisms at enterprise scale.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer, Security

   Square

   Aug 2021 — Present · Denver, CO, US

   Staff-level security engineer leading enterprise access management and authorization platforms across company-wide distributed infrastructure. Architect authentication and authorization systems, policy enforcement layers, and production access controls at scale- Served as DRI for the platform centrally managing production access across enterprise infrastructure, governing authentication, authorization, and permission propagation for critical systems- Re-architected legacy BeyondCorp-style authorization logic into Go-based services, migrating enforcement out of monolithic proxy infrastructure into cloud-native control planes- Designed and implemented edge-based authentication and coarse-grained authorization using Cloudflare Zero Trust, including custom Cloudflare Workers for policy evaluation and request enrichment- Implemented structured permission models with signed JWT-based context propagation to downstream services for consistent authorization enforcement- Designed secure OIDC and SSO integrations with Okta, hardening login flows with PKCE and strengthening redirect and token handling protections- Defined authorization boundaries across IAM systems, identity providers, and service-level enforcement layers to ensure least-privilege access controls across distributed systems- Built operational governance and risk-scoring frameworks to document ownership, access workflows, control boundaries, and authorization-related failure modes- Acted as incident lead for identity and access control events, translating reliability and security incidents into architectural and policy-level remediation.

Education

• University of Colorado Denver

  BS, Music Technical Focus

  2004 — 2008

Skills

• Video
• Nginx
• Public Speaking
• Jquery
• Advertising
• Management
• Project Management
• Web Development
• Microsoft Office
• Javascript
• Web Design
• Broadcast
• Television
• User Experience
• Web Content Management
• Strategic Planning
• Information Architecture
• Drupal
• Systems Integration
• Radio
• Integration
• Sound
• Php
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Web Hosting