Lead Software Engineer

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.