Lead Software Engineer, PKI & Cryptographic Trust Services

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action, tech meets trust, and innovation is a way of life. The Agentforce team is shaping the future of AI, and this role is at the heart of building the cryptographic trust layer that secures the world’s most trusted enterprise cloud.

About the role

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. You will 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 workflows, review code, and generate comprehensive tests, setting the standard for AI-augmented software development.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 9+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep, production-grade expertise in Go (Golang), Java, or Rust, including advanced concurrency patterns, memory management, and multi-substrate build configurations.
• 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).
• Ability to design resilient RESTful and gRPC web services, backed by robust distributed state machines and asynchronous processing pipelines.
• Strong background in observability (telemetry, distributed tracing, metrics) and modern CI/CD deployment pipelines.
• Proficiency with AI coding assistants and shared-context workflows that enhance engineering velocity.
• Demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering, using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor) in development workflows.
• 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.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Qualifications

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

Pay

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.

Benefits

• Time off programs
• Medical, dental, vision, and mental health support
• Paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k) and employee stock purchasing program

More details about company benefits can be found at Salesforce Benefits.