Principal Systems Engineer

Sectigo • Ottawa, ON

21d • CA$130,000 - CA$170,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We are building next‑generation trust infrastructure and high‑performance systems that power certificate lifecycle and emerging industry trust models. This Principal Software Engineer position is a senior, hands-on distributed systems role focused on trust infrastructure while building production-grade backend services at scale. You will work on systems that require high correctness, reliability, and operational discipline. This role extends beyond internal development. You will collaborate across the broader ecosystem and upstream open-source projects, helping shape how modern trust infrastructure is implemented and operated in production—not just consuming it. As our trust platform evolves alongside industry direction, this role will naturally expand across adjacent trust and security infrastructure concerns.

Requirements

• Senior-level experience (Senior / Staff / Principal / Distinguished) in distributed systems or backend engineering is required.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and production service development is required.
• Deep understanding of scaling, fault tolerance, and system reliability is required.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency platforms is required.
• Strong discipline around production quality and operability is required.
• Working knowledge of security fundamentals and/or PKI (or ability to ramp quickly) is required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience contributing to open-source infrastructure projects is strongly preferred.
• Experience working in cross-organization or standards-driven environments is strongly preferred.
• Background in trust infrastructure, PKI, or security-critical systems is strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with large-scale data structures or transparency/log-based systems is strongly preferred.
• A highly experienced software engineer who enjoys building foundational infrastructure.
• Comfortable owning complex backend systems end‑to‑end.
• Pragmatic, disciplined, and focused on production quality.
• Interested in working in a domain that will evolve significantly over the coming years.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance distributed services in Golang.
• Scale systems for certificate issuance, validation, and lifecycle operations.
• Define and deliver production-grade reliability (availability, resilience, observability).
• Drive early architecture decisions impacting scalability, failure behavior, and cost.
• Translate evolving standards into real-world, production-ready systems.
• Collaborate with ecosystem partners and contribute upstream to open-source projects.
• Ensure systems are deployable, operable, and portable beyond single environments.
• Additional tasks associated with this position may be assigned in response to company initiatives and business needs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal