Senior Manager, Software Engineering - Authentication Platform

Salesforce; Washington; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking an Authentication Platform Engineering Manager in Bellevue, WA to lead the core identity services powering our production infrastructure. You will manage a team bridging legacy protocols with cloud-native identity standards, ensuring secure and resilient access across our global fleet.

Responsibilities include setting strategy for the Authentication Platform, guiding technical choices across Kerberos, LDAP, SAML, OIDC, WebAuthn/FIDO2, and TOTP, and driving high availability

Qualifications

• 13+ years of software engineering experience in infrastructure-centric environments.

Responsibilities

• Drive strategy and execution for the Authentication Platform to scale across environments.
• Provide technical leadership over Kerberos, LDAP, SAML, OIDC, WebAuthn/FIDO2, and TOTP.
• Ensure high availability of foundational identity services.
• Partner with security architects to implement Zero Trust principles.
• Coach engineers to grow in system design and architecture in AI-augmented workflows.
• Oversee AI tool integration into the development cycle with appropriate human review.

Skills

Kerberos

Identity protocols

Cloud platforms

Programming languages

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AI tools

Multi-agent workflows

Tools

Kubernetes

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.

Job Category

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.

Location: Bellevue, WA

The Experience

The Authentication Platform Engineering Manager leads the team responsible for the core identity services that power Salesforce's production infrastructure, including Kerberos-based authentication, Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP), and Fast Identity Online 2 (FIDO2) systems. This role sits at the heart of our Production Identity and Access Management (IAM) stack, ensuring every access request across our global fleet is secure, authenticated, and resilient. You will manage a team of specialists who bridge legacy infrastructure protocols and modern, cloud-native identity standards to defend against sophisticated threats.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Drive the strategy and execution for the Authentication Platform, ensuring these foundational services scale horizontally across diverse environments.
• Provide technical leadership across a diverse protocol stack, from Kerberos and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to modern WebAuthn/FIDO2 and TOTP implementations.
• Guarantee the reliability of services that are foundational dependencies for the entire company, targeting high availability standards.
• Partner with security architects to implement Zero Trust principles, ensuring the platform enforces strict adherence to least privilege and robust identity verification.
• Develop each engineer's ability to work effectively in an AI-augmented environment, moving beyond tracking output to actively coaching growth into higher-level system design and architecture work.
• Own how AI tools are integrated into the team's daily development cycle, including configuration, feedback loops, and the judgment calls about when human review is required to validate output.
• Serve as the guardian of architectural integrity, security best practices, and technical standards as AI increases code volume, coaching engineers to critically audit AI-generated code for logic flaws, vulnerabilities, and performance issues.

You're Our Person If...

• You have 13+ years of software engineering experience, including 3-5 years leading teams in high-pressure, infrastructure-centric environments.
• You have proven expertise in Kerberos and identity protocols such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and LDAP.
• You have experience managing systems with massive throughput and high-availability requirements in public cloud (AWS/GCP) or hybrid environments.
• You're familiar with Java, Go, or C#, and have experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and modern continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• You have active, hands-on proficiency with AI development tools; full utilization is the baseline expectation, along with deep technical expertise sufficient to evaluate architectural integrity and make informed decisions about AI-generated output.
• You have experience assessing candidates on their ability to formulate effective prompts, evaluate AI outputs, and orchestrate multi-agent workflows in addition to foundational technical skills.

Even Better If...

• You have experience building or maintaining enterprise-grade Identity Providers (IdP) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) platforms.
• You understand hardware security modules (HSMs), public key infrastructure (PKI), and secure credential storage.
• You have knowledge of how authentication systems meet Payment Card Industry (PCI), SOC2, or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements.
• You have experience managing on-call rotations for high-visibility production services, and a track record of hiring and growing senior engineering talent.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation