Django REST auth - users stored in external service

I've been wondering the best way to handle the case where a Django is used in a service-oriented architecture, so individual Django applications do not maintain their own user stores. One service maintains the user store, and others must call it in order to retrieve user information.

So far example, here is how I was thinking of building a custom authentication class in Django REST to handle this:

class SOAAuthentication(authentication.BaseAuthentication):

    def authenticate(self, request):
        token = request.get_token_from_auth_header()

        if not remote_auth_service.is_token_valid(token):
            raise AuthFailed('Token is invalid')

        user_properties = remote_users_service.get_user(token):
        # user_properties is a dict of properties

        if not user_properties:
            raise AuthFailed('User does not exist.')

        user = MyCustomUserClass(**user_properties)
        return (user, 'soa')

So no user info would get persisted in the Django application's database, and permission classes could interrogate the instance of MyCustomUserClass to figure out what groups a user belongs to.

Would this approach work for simple group-based authorization? My think is that I don't need object-level permissions, so there's no need to create rows for my users in the Django database.