Sr Software Engineer, Platform Cryptography

ServiceNow•San Diego, CA

18h

About The Position

The Senior Software Engineer, Core Cryptography will design and build secure, high-quality cryptographic services—including key management, PKI, and secrets—for ServiceNow’s large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platform. The role calls for hands-on engineering depth and a security-first mindset, with opportunities to apply ML and AI techniques to detect misuse and anomalies. The engineer works under the technical direction of staff+ engineers. The Platform Security team builds foundational security infrastructure and AI-driven detection systems for enterprise-scale operations. Its cryptography group owns the platform’s cryptographic backbone across certificate lifecycle, key management, secrets distribution, and workload identity. This work supports a SaaS platform and regulated environments.

Requirements

At least 4 years of professional software engineering experience with Java, Go, or an equivalent object-oriented language at production scale.
Advanced knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance and scale considerations.
Familiarity with distributed systems concepts, including resource isolation, concurrency, and scaling execution across shared infrastructure.
Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects with material technical risk across teams and processes.
Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes in a SaaS or multi-tenant environment.
Working knowledge of core cryptographic primitives, including symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and PKI/TLS fundamentals.
Demonstrated security-conscious coding habits, including secure coding, code review, unit testing, and automation.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with cryptography, PKI, key management, or secrets management systems.
Applied ML/AI exposure, such as anomaly detection, classification, or critically integrating AI tooling into engineering workflows; applied experience is favored over a pure research background.
Experience building distributed backend systems, including microservices and SQL/NoSQL data stores.
Exposure to regulated environments such as FIPS 140-2/3 or FedRAMP.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain secure cryptographic services that meet FIPS compliance and regulated-environment requirements.
Build and operate services in the core cryptography ecosystem, including key management, certificate lifecycle, and secrets distribution, prioritizing reliability and security.
Apply ML and statistical techniques to identify anomalous key usage, abnormal secrets access, and unusual certificate request patterns.
Contribute to inference and detection pipelines that surface cryptographic misuse or compromise indicators in near real time.
Collaborate with product owners, security architects, and engineering teams to translate security and compliance requirements into working code.
Operate services on Kubernetes in a multi-tenant SaaS environment, including deployment, CI/CD, on-call duties, and incident response.
Threat-model designs, write secure code, review code rigorously, and identify logic errors and cryptographic anti-patterns.
Stay current on cryptographic advancements, including post-quantum readiness, and bring relevant ideas to the team.