Software Engineering Architect, PKI & Trust Services

Momentum; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Leadout Capital seeks an accomplished Architect to define the strategy and direction for a global, multi-cloud PKI and trust platform. You will drive architecture for certificate lifecycles, identity, and secure communications across workloads and AI agents, balancing reliability with security and scale.

You’ll prototype in live systems, present proposals to executives, mentor engineers, and influence cross-team decisions while advancing post-quantum readiness and zero-downtime migrations.

Qualifications

• 12+ years designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in reliability, security and performance at scale.
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, and service mesh.
• Strong leadership and ability to influence across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own target architecture and multi-year strategy for certificate lifecycle and trust infrastructure.
• Architect highly available, globally scalable trust infrastructure with measurable SLOs.
• Lead automation-first, zero-downtime migrations and data-driven build-versus-buy decisions.
• Set standards for interfaces between the trust platform and dependent infrastructure.
• Stay hands-on by prototyping, writing critical-path code, and validating architecture.
• Present investment and architecture proposals to senior leadership and mentor engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems architecture

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP)

Kubernetes

Security and PKI

Leadership / cross-functional

AI-first engineering

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Related technical degree

Job description

The Experience

Every service on a global, multi-cloud platform rests on one foundation: trust. The systems that issue certificates, establish workload and AI agent identity, and protect cryptographic keys let millions of services prove their identity to one another.

As an Architect, you define the strategy and technical direction for this foundation as the industry moves to shorter certificate lifetimes, fully automated lifecycle management, and post-quantum cryptography.

This is a hands-on architecture role for a distributed-systems leader with strong security depth. You design for continuous global availability, guide the evolution of our cryptography without disrupting dependent services, and implement working systems across multiple engineering teams. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and key-management expertise are strong advantages, but deep distributed-systems and security judgment matter most.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Own the target architecture and multi-year strategy for certificate lifecycle, trust distribution, and cryptographic identity across workloads and AI agents, and lead execution through production.
• Architect highly available, globally scalable trust infrastructure with measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and fleet-wide automated certificate renewal capabilities.
• Drive automation-first, cost-effective architecture focused on zero-touch lifecycle operations, zero-downtime migrations, and data-driven build-versus-buy decisions.
• Establish architectural and security standards for the interfaces between the trust platform and dependent infrastructure, and guide teams through complex design trade-offs.
• Stay hands-on by prototyping, writing critical-path code, and validating architecture in live systems.
• Present investment and architecture proposals to senior leadership, mentor engineering leads, and scale technical expertise across the organization.

You're Our Person If...

• You have 12+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure services, with a proven track record of driving multi-team technical strategy into production.
• You have deep expertise in distributed-systems architecture, reliability, and performance at scale.
• You have hands-on experience operating mission-critical, highly available services on public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including Kubernetes and service mesh.
• You have security domain experience in identity and authorization, applied cryptography, or infrastructure security.
• You have working knowledge of PKI, X.509 certificates, mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS), and key management.
• You have proven leadership in aligning cross-organizational initiatives without direct authority.
• You have strong communication skills, with a track record of authoring adopted architecture proposals and presenting effectively to both engineers and executives.
• You bring 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 (for example, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or Cursor) in development workflows.
• You hold a related technical degree.

Even Better If...

• You have built or operated certificate, identity, or key-management services at scale.
• You are familiar with workload identity standards (for example, Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE)) and short-lived credentials.
• You know post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards, such as Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM), Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA), and hybrid key exchange in TLS 1.3, as well as emerging approaches like Merkle Tree Certificates and crypto-agility design principles.
• You have contributed to technical standards bodies (for example, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the CA/Browser Forum, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) or to major open-source projects.