Senior PKI & Machine Identity Architect

Nscale; Amersfoort; On-site; EUR 187,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Flexible paid time off

Parental leave

Retirement plan participation

Job summary

Nscale is building AI infrastructure at scale and seeks a Senior Staff Machine Identity and PKI Engineer to define standards across SRE, platform and product. You’ll own CA design, machine identity, secrets and PKI strategies with long-term impact, including post-quantum readiness.

You’ll implement a certificate lifecycle platform, automate issuance and renewal, and align with HashiCorp Vault usage, OIDC federation, and cloud service identities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure security or SRE, with deep work on workload identity, secrets and PKI.
• Hands-on PKI expertise spanning CA hierarchy design, certificate profiles, revocation and HSMs.
• Experience with a certificate lifecycle management platform such as Keyfactor, Entrust, AppViewX, DigiCert or similar.
• Production experience with HashiCorp Vault, including auth methods, dynamic secrets and the PKI engine.
• Experience with cloud workload identity, OIDC federation from CI, Kubernetes service accounts and RBAC.
• Ability to write code in Go or Python and work with Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Build the non-human identity register, covering cloud service accounts, CI credentials, API keys, tokens, certificates and agent identities, each with an owner, scope and rotation date.
• Replace static, long-lived credentials with short-lived workload identity using GitHub Actions OIDC, cloud workload identity federation, Kubernetes service account tokens, and SPIFFE/SPIRE where it fits.
• Own Nscale’s PKI and lead implementation of a certificate lifecycle management platform, with selection currently under way. Automate issuance and renewal using ACME, cert-manager and EST/SCEP, and implement device certificates for managed endpoints.
• Set the machine secrets standard and partner with SRE, who run HashiCorp Vault, on how workloads authenticate to it and use its PKI.
• Define how AI agents and tool integrations get their own identity, a human owner, scoped access and a tested kill switch.
• Plan for post-quantum cryptography across the certificate estate.

Skills

PKI engineering

Certificate lifecycle management

CA hierarchy design

Go or Python coding

Terraform

RBAC and Kubernetes service accounts

Cloud workload identity / OIDC

HashiCorp Vault usage

Tools

Keyfactor

Entrust

AppViewX

DigiCert

HashiCorp Vault

Job description

Nscale is building AI infrastructure at scale and seeks a Senior Staff Machine Identity and PKI Engineer to define standards across SRE, platform and product. You’ll own CA design, machine identity, secrets and PKI strategies with long-term impact, including post-quantum readiness.

You’ll implement a certificate lifecycle platform, automate issuance and renewal, and align with HashiCorp Vault usage, OIDC federation, and cloud service identities.