1Password is growing. We’ve surpassed $400M in ARR and we’re continuing to accelerate, earning a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 for four years in a row and teaming up with iconic partners like Oracle Red Bull Racing.
About 1Password
At 1Password, we’re building the foundation for a safe, productive digital future. Our mission is to unleash employee productivity without compromising security by ensuring every identity is authentic, every application sign-in is secure, and every device is trusted. We innovated the market-leading enterprise password manager and pioneered Unified Access Management, a new cybersecurity category built for the way people and AI agents work today. As one of the most loved brands in cybersecurity, we take a human-centric approach in everything from product strategy to user experience. Over 180,000 businesses, from Fortune 100 leaders to the world’s most innovative AI companies, trust 1Password to help their teams securely adopt the SaaS and AI tools they need to do their best work.
If you're excited about the opportunity to contribute to the digital safety of millions, to work alongside a team of curious, driven individuals, and to solve hard problems in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, then we want to hear from you. Come join us and help shape a safer, simpler digital future.
As a Senior Sales Engineer, you’ll act as a strategic technical advisor and trusted partner to our Enterprise sales team and customers. You’ll elevate sales efficiency and customer engagement by delivering deep technical expertise, tailored demos, and customer-specific insights throughout the sales cycle.
Working closely with Account Executives, you’ll craft solutions that align 1Password’s capabilities with customer challenges and goals, navigating complex requirements, influencing technical stakeholders, and clearly articulating value from discovery to close. Experience with frameworks like MEDDPICC is a strong plus, as you’ll help qualify opportunities, define technical success criteria, and drive alignment within deals.
This role requires agility and foresight, identifying opportunities, positioning our product suite, and ensuring proposed solutions meet technical needs. You’ll also collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Support to strengthen customer-facing resources.
As a senior team member, you’ll mentor peers, sharing knowledge to uplevel both technical expertise and soft skills across the Solutions Engineering team.
This role is a remote opportunity based in the US or Canada.
************ Must be based in MST or PST time zone **************
How we’re using AI today
Across GTM, we’re transforming the way we work with AI. We expect every seller, CSM, and team member to become a power user, using it daily to work smarter and move faster. AI is already embedded in how we operate – from real-time coaching that sharpens how we sell and interact with customers, to surfacing insights that help us anticipate needs – creating more time for meaningful customer engagement. If you’re excited to reshape how you think, make decisions, and drive growth with AI, you’ll feel right at home here.
What we're looking for:
7+ years of experience in customer-facing technical sales roles within a B2B environment.
Proven track record of selling into Fortune-100 customers
Experience in a multi-product SaaS environment.
Proven track record in enterprise sales, with the ability to build relationships, influence stakeholders, and support closing complex deals.
Skilled at translating technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong presentation, communication, and collaboration skills across sales, product, marketing, and support teams.
Ability to quickly learn, adapt, and navigate dynamic customer conversations and requirements.
Experienced with modern sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC for opportunity qualification and deal progression.
High degree of autonomy with the ability to manage multiple projects, maintain quality, and meet deadlines.
Willingness to mentor colleagues and share best practices to support team growth.
Ability to travel up to 25%
Familiarity with SaaS, security concepts, and developer technologies such as SCIM, CLI, SAML/SSO/OAuth, AD, API, SSH and AI (MCP).
What you can expect:
Serve as the primary technical advisor/resource within 1Password’s Go-to-Market team.
Proactively scope and recommend tailored technical solutions and support that address both expressed and unspoken customer needs—aligning with use cases, business goals, and decision criteria for a variety of Enterprise customers including those on the higher end of the segment.
Build strong relationships & deliver technical coaching to Account Executives, empowering them to speak confidently about product capabilities and align messaging with customer challenges, use cases, and requirements.
Provide technical education to customers regarding the 1Password suite of products.
USA-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $124,000USD and $180,000USD, and is commission-eligible. This role is also immediate participation in 1Password's benefits program (health, dental, 401k and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.
Canada-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $127,000 CAD and $184,000 CAD, and is commission-eligible. This role is also eligible for immediate participation in 1Password’s generous benefits program (health, dental, RRSP and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.
At 1Password, we approach each individual's compensation with a promise of fair market value and internal equity commensurate with experience and specific skill set.
This posting is for an existing vacancy.
Our culture
At 1Password, we prioritize collaboration, clear and transparent communication, receptiveness to feedback, and alignment with our core values: keep it simple, lead with honesty, and put people first.
You’ll be part of a team that challenges the status quo, and is excited to experiment and iterate in search of the best solution. That said, 1Password is not for everyone. Our work is demanding, we strive for excellence, and the pace is fast. We need people who are keen to take on challenging problems, who seek feedback to grow, and who are driven to make an impact. If you're looking for a place where you can settle into a comfortable routine, this might not be the right fit for you. We’re looking for individuals who are proven experts in their fields, as well as those who are highly adaptable, can thrive in ambiguity and through change, are curious, and above all deliver results.
How we work with AI
We are committed to leveraging cutting-edge technology—including AI—to achieve our mission. We also understand that thinking critically about AI in its current forms will help us create better solutions for our customers and ourselves with its future forms, which will help us continue to close the gap between security and privacy and achieve our mission. We want team members at all levels to take the approach of actively learning AI best practices, identifying opportunities to apply AI in meaningful ways, and driving innovative solutions in their daily work. Embracing the future of AI isn't just encouraged—it's an essential part of how we will be successful at 1Password.
This approach extends to our hiring process—candidates are welcome to use AI tools responsibly and thoughtfully during the application process.
Our approach to work
We recognize the power of both in person collaboration and remote work. Some roles are designated as remote-first, with an expectation that individuals work from their homes majority of the time, while others are designated as in-office roles, with an expectation of being on-site on a regular basis. We recognize that certain roles benefit from regular, in-person connection to support collaboration, team cohesion, and customer engagement.
For all roles, occasional travel may be required. This includes things like: department-wide offsites, quarterly department meetings and periodic customer events. These events are typically held in varying locations across Canada, USA and/or EMEA. In leadership roles, you can expect to travel once per month on average.
Note: All go-to market roles will have an in-person onboarding in Toronto.
What we offer
We believe in working hard, and rewarding that hard work through our benefits. While not an exhaustive list, here is a glance at what we currently offer:
Health and wellbeing
👶 Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
🩺 Competitive health benefits
🏝 Generous PTO policy
Growth and future
📈 RSU program for most employees
💸 Retirement matching program
🔑 Free 1Password account
Community
🤝 Paid volunteer days
🏆 Peer-to-peer recognition through Bonusly
🌎 Remote-first work environment
*Some roles in our GTM team are currently being hired for in-person hybrid work in Toronto and Austin. These roles will specify on the posting.
You belong here.
1Password is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that is built on trust, support and respect. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. Be yourself, find your people and share the things you love.
Accommodation is available upon request at any point during our recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please speak to your talent acquisition partner or email us at [email protected] and we’ll work to meet your needs.
Remote work is a part of our DNA. Given that our company was founded remotely in 2005, we can safely say we're experts at building remote culture. That said, remote work at 1Password does mean working from your home country. If you've got questions or concerns about this, your talent partner would be happy to address them with you.
Successful applicants will be required to complete a background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, publicly available social media, credit history, or other information, as permitted by local law.
1Password uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, including natural language processing and predictive analytics, to assist in the initial screening of employment applications and improve our recruitment process. See here for the latest third party bias audit information. If you prefer not to have your application assessed using AI/ML features, you may opt out by completing this form. For additional information see our Candidate Privacy Notice.
1Password builds password management and identity security software for individuals, families, and organizations. Its password manager stores logins, passkeys, and sensitive documents in encrypted vaults, with apps and browser extensions that generate passwords and fill them into websites. Businesses use administrative controls to set access permissions, monitor sign-ins, and automate account provisioning through integrations with their existing identity systems. The company sells subscriptions for personal accounts and teams, while developer tools retrieve credentials for applications without putting secrets directly in source code. Founded in 2005, 1Password is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario.
Company Size
1,001-5,000
Company Stage
Series C
Total Funding
$920M
Headquarters
Toronto, Canada
Founded
2005
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The engineering reality of HashiCorp Vault and its alternatives. HashiCorp Vault provides dynamic secrets to mitigate the 49% of breaches involving credentials. Security teams must weigh the engineering effort of managing Vault against SaaS options like Akeyless or CyberArk Conjur based on their specific integration needs. IBM completed the acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025 for a $6.4 billion enterprise value. Business operations moved to IBM on September 1, 2025. Vault 2.0 arrived in April 2026, while version 2.1.1 shipped on September 16, 2026. You already know that hard-coded credentials in repositories represent a primary attack vector. A 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that credentials remain a primary attack vector in over 49% of breaches. IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report estimates the average cost of a breach at $4.45 million. Vault addresses this by replacing long-lived static tokens and API keys in container images with dynamic secrets that generate short-lived credentials for databases and cloud providers. These credentials expire automatically to shrink the window of opportunity for leaked secrets. The platform includes 26 secrets engines, 21 authentication methods, and 23 storage backends, while providing Kubernetes support via the Agent Injector, the Vault Secrets Operator, and a CSI provider. You can authenticate via Kubernetes service accounts, cloud provider IAM roles, or OIDC tokens. The flexibility of Vault makes it a strong choice for multi-cloud environments. The management of high availability, unsealing ceremonies, and replication topology requires skilled platform engineers. If your team cannot absorb these operations, you should skip Vault. Comparing Conjur, Akeyless, and 1Password. CyberArk Conjur is now part of the Idira platform after its acquisition by Palo Alto Networks. Conjur provides a policy-driven engine for machine identity. It uses human-readable policy files in YAML or Conjur policy DSL to define permissions. Conjur follows a server-client model where a master server hosts the policy and secret store. Applications authenticate using host identity or Kubernetes authenticators. If your organization uses CyberArk for human users, Conjur uses the same policy engine and audit logs for machine secrets. 1Password provides a different use case, often as a tool to share account credentials. 1Password is not a direct competitor to Vault, and 1Password's secret automation integrates with HashiCorp Vault as a provider. Some teams use 1Password for simpler tasks where Vault is overkill. The decision between these platforms requires you to weigh the engineering effort needed to run a Vault cluster against the per-secret costs of a managed service like Akeyless or the enterprise licensing fees of Conjur. Akeyless uses a zero-knowledge Distributed Fragments Cryptography model to split secrets across multiple cloud providers. You deploy lightweight Gateways inside your own network to broker access without the secret leaving your perimeter. Akeyless supports Universal Identity, which includes AWS IAM, Azure AD, GCP service accounts, and GitHub Actions OIDC. Akeyless charges roughly $0.05 to $0.10 per secret per month on its SaaS tiers. CyberArk Conjur Cloud costs approximately $15 to $40 per authenticating workload per month. For teams with strong platform engineering capacity, Vault OSS is often the lowest total cost option. I would skip the budget savings of the free versions if your team lacks the capacity to manage a production cluster. To decide, list your five highest-priority integration targets and map them to the integration documentation for each platform. The platform with the shallowest integration path across your specific targets is usually the right answer regardless of feature marketing. Platform migration is non-trivial. The hardest part is not migrating secrets themselves but re-wiring application authentication. Akeyless maintains a Vault compatibility API path that allows some tooling to be re-pointed with environment variable changes. The licensing landscape and alternatives. Vault is source-available under BUSL 1.1, not open source. Individual releases convert to MPL 2.0 four years after publication. Because Vault 2.1.1 was published in September 2026, it will not become open source until September 2030. This licensing change pushed many teams toward OpenBao, a fork under the Linux Foundation and OpenSSF. OpenBao version 2.6.2 shipped in August 2026, and the v2.7 beta arrived in September 2026. OpenBao includes post-quantum ML-DSA support and pure post-quantum TLS. It is currently diverging from Vault by shipping namespace sealing ahead of upstream. The decision depends on your infrastructure. If your team uses Terraform, Vault is the best choice because the Terraform Vault provider is mature. The Vault Secrets Operator for Kubernetes is also actively maintained. Does the move to IBM's support lifecycle change the long-term viability of the platform for independent DevOps teams? For organizations managing hundreds of secrets across many environments, manual user management becomes a significant operational burden. Vault does not support SCIM provisioning on any plan, meaning IT teams must manually create user accounts and manage policies separately from their identity provider. This creates a gap where departing employees might retain access to production secrets even after they are deprovisioned from other systems. For teams needing dynamic secrets across clouds without running a cluster, neither Vault nor AWS Secrets Manager is the perfect fit. AWS Secrets Manager is a managed service that charges $0.40 per secret each month. The break-even point between a managed service and the labor of running Vault sits between 3,000 and 8,000 secrets, depending on your environment.
1Password named a leader in the GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Password Management. by Rachel Sudbeck October 6, 2026 - 5 min Identity and access have changed drastically in the past decade. To meet the needs of the modern enterprise perimeter, Enterprise Password Managers (EPM) have evolved far beyond traditional workplace password storage. The GigaOm Radar: Enterprise Password Management charts this evolution of the category. As the report states, "...evaluation now turns on what surrounds the vault: passwordless login paths, machine and AI-agent credential delivery, breach intelligence, and the administrative machinery to govern all of it at scale." As such, it's an honor to announce that GigaOm Radar positions 1Password as a Leader and Disruptive Pioneer among Enterprise Password Management platforms. This is the fifth year running that 1Password has been named a leader in EPM. Read on to learn more about the Radar's analysis and criteria for EPM platforms, and how 1Password's solutions are built to manage the complex access needs of modern companies. Why GigaOm declared 1Password a leader in Enterprise Password Management. GigaOm's report analyzes 23 EPM vendors according to how well they meet essential enterprise password management requirements, such as strong cryptography and the ability to manage developer secrets. It also analyzes emerging critical capabilities within enterprise password management, such as managing credential and secrets access for AI agents. The report calls attention to how EPM platforms serve various security and management needs across the "Tech Buying Triad" of CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs. Across the core capabilities for these buyers, 1Password EPM ranked highly on several distinct criteria. These include, among others: * Browser and application coverage * Developer API ecosystem * Identity integration extensibility * Passwordless and passkey support * Secrets management integration * Compliance certifications * Vault cryptography architecture 1Password's strength is depth on two axes, developer tooling and identity integration. The developer surface carries published OpenAPI specifications, maintained Go, JavaScript and Python SDKs, a Terraform provider, a Kubernetes operator, and an explicit version-support and compatibility statement. Identity integration backs it up: OIDC Unlock with SSO participates in key management, with device-key-encrypted credential bundles and IdP policy evaluated at every unlock...For an organization that wants its vault wired into identity and developer workflow rather than sitting alongside it, 1Password is built for the job." -Paul Stringfellow, GigaOm Radar: Enterprise Password Management AI-agent and non-human identity governance with 1Password EPM. AI agents and other non-human identities (NHIs) are increasingly used in enterprise environments to access applications, APIs, infrastructure, and sensitive data. An agent may need credentials to complete a specific task, but their access needs differ from human employees. To prevent credentials from becoming permanently accessible through the agent's context, that access should be scoped, time-bound, individually revocable, and audited separately from the human who initiated the work. Critically, GigaOm's report also highlights 1Password as a leader in its "Disruptive Pioneer" category, referring to organizations that leverage emerging technologies to redefine authentication and access management. In particular, they ranked 1Password highly in their criteria for "Agentic non-human identity credential governance." If AI agents will access credentials in your environment, they should have their own identities. These should be scoped, expiring, individually revocable, and audited separately from their human sponsors. A vault that allows an agent to use only its owner's identity may make it harder to establish exactly who, or what, performed an action during an audit." -Paul Stringfellow, GigaOm Radar: Enterprise Password Management Governing access for AI agents and NHIs is a critical capability in the modern enterprise. 1Password's own research has found that while 65% of developers say they're expected or encouraged to use AI agents, only 33% have a secure way to do so. GigaOm echoes these findings, stating that "Agentic and non-human identity governance is the youngest capability in this evaluation and one of its weakest field-wide... The gap between the front and the floor is wider here than on any established criterion." In short, capabilities like agentic autofill make 1Password truly unique among EPM offerings, with a singular strength in its platform's ability to manage credential access for agents and NHIs. Innovation built on a strong foundation. The modern enterprise faces continuous evolution in how 1Password LLC define credentials and identities, and EPM platforms need to straddle this divide. For example, passwordless authentication is critical to modern security, but few would argue that it means 1Password LLC can stop securing traditional passwords. 1Password has been named a leader in GigaOm's EPM Radar for the fifth year running; for an EPM to be effective, it needs to evolve to meet modern enterprise access needs, while still providing essential security controls. GigaOm's report this year illustrates that 1Password EPM is a leader on both fronts. AI agents and NHIs present security leaders with new credential and access challenges. The GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Password Management makes it clear that 1Password is uniquely able to manage this new access perimeter, built on a security model that provides the strongest foundation for credential and secrets management. Ready to read the full GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Password Management?
Viral AI assistant Instinct now has its own email address. Instinct's new email feature lets the AI agent create and manage accounts, contact businesses, handle support requests, and do more on users' behalf. Instinct, the buzzy new AI assistant now valued at $2.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature that will allow it to do more on its users' behalf: It's giving everyone Instinct email addresses. The company's founder, Noah Shinn, said on Tuesday that the new email addresses let the agent create and run its own accounts without cluttering up users' inboxes. Shinn said the idea is to allow Instinct to handle the account sign-up and management for you if it needs to do so for completing tasks that require email, like creating accounts on various services, contacting businesses, and following up on things that need attention. "For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task," Shinn wrote on X. IntelPro is giving Instinct access to more tools. Starting today, your Instinct will have its own email address. This is the first step towards enabling your Instinct to own and run its own accounts. Most everyday tasks flow through your email: creating accounts, confirming bookings,... pic.twitter.com/brwQSsJnmJ Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn) September 8, 2026 The feature could help make Instinct's user experience more seamless, as users wouldn't have to intervene to log in or provide their credentials. (Instinct partnered with 1Password on the latter last week.) But for businesses trying to establish a relationship with their customers, having an AI manage the account would provide a layer of obscurity as to who they're actually dealing with. Customers, however, may see this as a perk, as many are these days tired of having to turn over their emails and phone numbers just to complete simple tasks or one-offs. Instinct says it has reserved some email addresses for its earliest users, and others can claim theirs at mail.instinct.com. Shinn suggested that users could now forward emails to Instinct, too, when it needs certain information to complete a task. For example, if a user wants Instinct to handle a product return on their behalf, they could forward their order confirmation to Instinct's email address. Then Instinct could contact support, provide the order details, ask whether they wanted a return or replacement, and then come back with the return label to print. Instinct's email can also be added to group threads so it can keep track of the information exchanged, or it can be sent a long thread that the user needs to work with, perhaps by asking what decisions still need to be made, which tasks are due when, or other questions. The bot will check back in with the user when it requires their input, but otherwise will act autonomously. The feature is one of several recent updates aimed at improving Instinct's capabilities. It follows the recent partnership with 1Password to help enable logins to users' existing accounts, as well as a new location-sharing feature that lets Instinct understand where the user is currently so it can help them find nearby businesses or restaurants, or map routes and itineraries, among other things. Users can also ask questions about their location history, like where they parked or what restaurant they tried last month. Instinct also partnered with Stripe in August to offer a more seamless payment experience, letting the agent do things like book trips, classes, and appointments and make purchases.
1Password just pledged $300,000 to DHH's Omarchy, and its own employees aren't happy. Internal Slack messages show the CEO and cofounder gave staff two very different explanations for the decision. Omarchy has been on something of a roll now. Funding for its foundation has been climbing fast, from an $8 million launch to $10 million a few weeks later, and now crossing $13 million with the most recent pledge. What's drawn my attention are the first two Corporate Patrons, 1Password and 37signals, both of whom have decided to pitch $100,000 a year for the next three years. Now, 37signals I get; DHH is heavily involved there, but 1Password was a surprise entry. Naturally, not everyone's onboard with their pledge. Signs of disagreement. This has not gone well with employees working at 1Password, with company leadership having to take certain damage control measures to assure their staff. An internal Slack message has surfaced (courtesy of The Verge), which shows cofounder Roustem Karimov downplaying the criticism, telling team members that: people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind. However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked. CEO David Faugno responded on a different note, telling employees the company doesn't endorse DHH's views, while also noting that Omarchy is the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password's own users. Why the backlash? DHH is known to be someone who firmly falls on the "right" side of the political spectrum, someone who doesn't shy away from putting his opinions in public view. He regularly posts blogs that show where he stands on certain societal issues, and some of his recent writeups are what's fueling this particular backlash. His recent July post, titled "Wolves, sheep, and gypsies," compares Denmark's wolf population with the Romani people camping in Copenhagen parks, where he argues: "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them." Then there's "As I remember London" from September 2025, where he laments about London losing its native Brit majority and a nod of approval for a Tommy Robinson march. Of course, these aren't the only factors behind his disapproval, but you get the gist of it, right? Users could jump ship. If you search for the terms "1Password" and "Omarchy" right now, you are bound to run into the many comments made by disgruntled 1Password users on Reddit and Hacker News. They are calling the choice tone-deaf, given how many smaller open source projects could've benefited from the money. Some are already jumping to alternatives like Bitwarden, while others suggest self-hosting Vaultwarden or going with KeePass and its forks instead. I see the issue compounding too. Back in February, 1Password raised subscription prices, taking effect at renewals from March 27. Individual plans went up 33 percent from $35.88 to $47.88 a year, and family plans went up 20 percent from $59.88 to $71.88. Its community forum already has a long thread full of longtime users saying they were leaving over it. If 1Password continues playing with its users' trust like this, who knows what kind of exodus it will see next? Enjoyed this update? Support independent Linux news coverage It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help Ubo stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks. Plus yearly Best value Plus lifetime Pay once, Enjoy forever Buy Ubo a coffee Any amount, no commitment A nerd with a passion for open source software, custom PC builds, motorsports, and exploring the endless possibilities of this world.
Managing secrets securely in Kubernetes with 1Password. 02.09.2026 Reading time: 4 mins. Last Updated: 02.09.2026 Table of contents. Managing secrets securely in Kubernetes is a critical challenge for modern cloud-native environments. Application credentials, certificates, private keys, and passwords must be handled in a way that is secure, auditable, and operationally flexible - especially when regular rotation is required. By integrating 1Password with Kubernetes using the External Secrets Operator (ESO), teams can centralize secret management while keeping sensitive data out of Git repositories and Kubernetes manifests. This approach enables Kubernetes workloads to consume secrets securely while maintaining strong access control and rotation practices. Architecture overview: 1Password + Kubernetes. The 1Password integration with Kubernetes works by introducing an abstraction layer between Kubernetes and the 1Password cloud API. Instead of Kubernetes communicating directly with 1Password's cloud service, a 1Password Connect Server runs inside the cluster. This design provides better security, performance, and control. * Kubernetes communicates with the External Secrets Operator * ESO talks to the 1Password Connect Server inside the cluster * The Connect Server authenticates to 1Password using a token * Requested secrets are fetched and returned to Kubernetes This architecture allows secrets to be synced securely into Kubernetes-native Secret objects. Step 1: install External Secrets Operator and configure ClusterSecretStore. To begin, you must install the External Secrets Operator in your Kubernetes cluster. ESO provides the Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) required to define how Kubernetes connects to external secret providers. The most important CRD in this setup is the ClusterSecretStore. It is a cluster-wide resource that defines how Kubernetes authenticates and communicates with 1Password. Example configuration: kubectl get ClusterSecretStore/ie-onepassword -o yaml apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1 kind: ClusterSecretStore spec: conditions: - namespaceSelector: matchLabels: bango.com/dept: Engineering provider: onepassword: auth: secretRef: connectTokenSecretRef: key: token name: onepassword-connect-token-ie namespace: ns-dev-external-secrets connectHost: http://onepassword-connect.ns-dev-1password-connect-server.svc.cluster.local:8080 vaults: Engineering DevTest: 1 This configuration instructs ESO to communicate with the 1Password Connect Server rather than the public 1Password API. The Connect Pod authenticates using a token and retrieves secrets from the specified vault. Step 2: create externalsecret resources for applications. To consume secrets inside an application - for example, a service that uses a client certificate to authenticate to a remote endpoint - you must define an ExternalSecret resource. apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1 kind: ExternalSecret metadata: labels: env: dev name: dev-cert-external-secrets-even namespace: ns-dev-engineering-korek spec: data: - remoteRef: key: CERT Engineering|endpoint|Cert|dev 20260626 property: endpoint_dev_CERT_PUBLIC.pem secretKey: CERT_PEM - remoteRef: key: CERT Engineering|endpoint|Key|dev 20260626 property: endpoint_dev_KEY.key secretKey: CERT_PRIVKEY target: name: dev-external-secrets-even creationPolicy: Owner deletionPolicy: Retain Key Concepts Explained * remoteRef.property specifies the exact entry inside 1Password to be retrieved. * Applications cannot reference ExternalSecret objects directly. * The target section defines the Kubernetes Secret that ESO creates and keeps in sync. This target secret is what applications ultimately consume. Supporting certificate rotation with even/odd secrets. To enable safe certificate and key rotation, it's recommended to maintain two ExternalSecrets: * dev-external-secrets-even * dev-external-secrets-odd This approach allows: * Seamless certificate rotation * Zero-downtime updates * Easy rollbacks by switching references When a rotation cycle is approaching, new certificates can be added to 1Password and synced to the inactive ExternalSecret without impacting the running application. Understanding creationPolicy and deletionPolicy. Two fields require special attention: creationPolicy: Owner * ESO creates the Kubernetes Secret if it doesn't exist * ESO updates the Secret whenever the external value changes * Deleting the ExternalSecret deletes the target Secret Alternatively, Merge can be used when multiple controllers manage the same Secret. deletionPolicy: Retain * If a secret is accidentally removed from 1Password, the Kubernetes Secret remains * Prevents accidental outages caused by human error * Recommended for production workloads Step 3: verifying externalsecret health. kubectl -n ns-dev-app get externalsecret NAME STORETYPE STORE REFRESH INTERVAL STATUS READY dev-app-external-secrets-even ClusterSecretStore ie-onepassword 5m SecretSynced True dev-app-external-secrets-odd ClusterSecretStore ie-onepassword 5m SecretSynced True Updating secrets in 1Password automatically updates the corresponding Kubernetes Secret without disrupting the application. Step 4: mount multiple secrets using projected volumes. To make both certificate sets available in the same directory inside a container, you can use a projected volume. This allows multiple secrets to be mounted into a single path. Example using Flux and Kustomize: patch: |- - op: add path: "/spec/template/spec/volumes/-" value: name: app-keystore-cert projected: sources: - secret: name: dev-app-external-secrets-odd items: - key: TEST_PEM path: app_keystore-odd.pem - key: TEST_PRIVKEY path: app_keystore-private-odd.pem - secret: name: dev-app-external-secrets-even items: - key: TEST_PEM path: app_keystore-even.pem - key: TEST_PRIVKEY path: app_keystore-private-even.pem The final step is simply configuring the application to reference the appropriate file inside the container. Final thoughts. Using 1Password with Kubernetes via the External Secrets Operator provides a secure, flexible, and production-ready approach to secret management. This setup enables: * Centralized secret storage * Safe certificate rotation * Reduced blast radius from human error * Kubernetes-native secret consumption For teams operating at scale, this approach significantly improves both security posture and operational reliability. Check out more of its blog posts here. Signal, not noise -. Join 12,000+ engineers and business leaders getting field notes on SRE, DevOps and cloud- native reliability. Your work email. More posts. Encryption is one of the first security controls FinTech companies think about when discussing PCI DSS. Sensitive data is encrypted at rest. Connections use TLS. Payment information is tokenized. Cloud... Expanding an iGaming business into a new regulated market is rarely as simple as obtaining a new license. Every jurisdiction comes with its own regulatory expectations, technical requirements, security controls,... 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