Lead Software Engineer, PKI & Cryptographic Trust Services

salesforce.com, inc.; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 173,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to architect and scale the unified Registration Authority (RA) for certificate issuance across a global multi-cloud platform. You will drive complex distributed systems in Go, Java, or Rust while mentoring engineers and delivering secure, scalable software.

You will apply advanced concurrency, state-machine orchestration, and AI-augmented development practices to push the boundaries of secure, production-grade code across AWS/GCP environments.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of professional software development experience, with distributed systems expertise.
• Deep experience in Go, Java, or Rust, including advanced concurrency and memory management.
• Experience deploying highly available services on AWS and GCP.
• Design of RESTful and gRPC services backed by robust state machines.
• Strong observability, telemetry, tracing, and CI/CD practices.
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants and prompt engineering.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and scale the RA for global multi-cloud platform.
• Develop and optimize concurrent build paths across public clouds.
• Implement certificate issuance paths with distributed state machines and automation.
• Lead code reviews, mentoring, and architectural decisions for reliability.
• Collaborate with Security to translate compliance into automated controls.
• Drive AI-augmented development practices and tooling.

Skills

Go

Java

Rust

Distributed systems

Concurrency

AWS/GCP

AI tools

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn't a buzzword - it's a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You're in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

The Experience

Salesforce Data Security is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale our unified certificate Registration Authority (RA), the front door for cryptographic trust across our global multi-cloud platform. This foundational trust layer authenticates and authorizes millions of certificate issuance requests daily, securing machine-to-machine communication, workload identity, and data-in-transit for the world's most trusted enterprise cloud. You lead the technical design and delivery of a highly concurrent, multi-substrate Go codebase, stay deep in the code while mentoring senior engineers, and drive architectural consensus across a distributed system where availability and security are non‑negotiable. This is an AI‑first engineering team: you use advanced AI coding assistants, prompt engineering, and shared-system-context tools daily to accelerate your workflows, review code, and generate comprehensive tests, setting the standard for AI-augmented software development.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Architect, build, and maintain the unified Registration Authority (RA) that serves as the single certificate-issuance front door for a global, multi-cloud platform.
• Design and optimize highly concurrent, multi-substrate build paths in Go, ensuring seamless deployment across diverse public-cloud environments.
• Develop and scale both synchronous and asynchronous certificate issuance paths using robust distributed state-machine orchestration.
• Implement strictly evaluated hierarchical policy engines and authorization controls to validate substrate-specific workload identity and attestation.
• Drive robust certificate lifecycle management and automation by integrating with and abstracting multiple public and private Certificate Authorities (CAs).
• Lead the team's engineering excellence by writing resilient, observable, and strictly tested code capable of surviving underlying infrastructure degradation.
• Instrument comprehensive telemetry, distributed tracing, and alerting to maintain stringent availability and performance service level agreements (SLAs).
• Act as a technical multiplier, mentoring engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, and raising the bar for distributed systems design.
• Partner with Security Architecture to translate complex compliance requirements into automated, scalable software controls.
• Respond to and resolve complex distributed systems escalations, identifying root causes and deploying durable architectural fixes.
• Elevate team productivity by establishing best practices for AI-augmented software development and prompt engineering.
• Build and ship high-quality, production-grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow, pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high-quality code.
• Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.
• Contribute to building and maintaining shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably, and critically evaluate code (human- or AI-generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

You're Our Person If...

• You have 9+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• You have deep, production-grade expertise in Go (Golang), Java, or Rust, including advanced concurrency patterns, memory management, and multi-substrate build configurations.
• You have extensive experience deploying and operating highly available, mission-critical services across public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• You can design resilient Representational State Transfer (RESTful) and gRPC web services, backed by robust distributed state machines and asynchronous processing pipelines.
• You have a strong background in observability (telemetry, distributed tracing, metrics) and modern continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) deployment pipelines.
• You are proficient with AI coding assistants and shared-context workflows that enhance engineering velocity.
• You have a demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering, using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
• You have experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows.
• You have advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.
• You have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Even Better If...

• You have deep domain knowledge of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), X.509 certificate profiles, and mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) architectures.
• You have a strong understanding of certificate lifecycle management and automated certificate provisioning.
• You are aware of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards, such as Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM), and crypto-agility design principles.
• You have experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and Infrastructure-as-Code paradigms.
• You are familiar with designing or operating multi-tenant policy engines and hierarchical authorization graphs.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you'll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we'll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates' resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that's inclusive, and free from discrimination. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications - without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions. The typical base salary range for this position is $172,500 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $207,800 - $285,800 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.