Description
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.
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.
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.
