Principal - IAM Advanced Authentication

Job Purpose:

The Principal Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, building, automating and improving GSK's enterprise certificate services. Reporting to the Lead, PKI, the role translates approved architecture, security standards and service priorities into secure, resilient production capabilities; makes day-to-day engineering decisions within those guardrails; and serves as a technical escalation point for complex PKI issues.

About the team:

The PKI team provides trusted machine, device, user and application identities across GSK. The team engineers and operates enterprise certificate authorities and certificate lifecycle services, enables automated certificate issuance and renewal, and supports secure communications across on-premises, cloud and operational technology environments. It works with security architecture, platform operations, application teams and service partners to maintain clear ownership from solution design through production support.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, build, configure and maintain enterprise certificate authority and registration authority services.
• Engineer secure certificate issuance, renewal, revocation and recovery processes for users, devices, applications and workloads.
• Automate certificate discovery, inventory, issuance, renewal, revocation and reporting using APIs, scripting, infrastructure as code and enterprise certificate lifecycle management platforms.
• Integrate PKI with Microsoft and Linux platforms, network and security devices, cloud services, DevOps pipelines, applications, mobile and endpoint management platforms, and operational technology environments.
• Implement certificate profiles, templates and policy controls in line with approved architecture, Certificate Policy and Certification Practice Statement requirements, security standards and cryptographic requirements.
• Monitor service health, capacity, availability, certificate expiry, issuance quality and control effectiveness; define actionable alerting and operational thresholds; and remediate vulnerabilities, performance constraints or configuration drift.
• Troubleshoot complex certificate, trust-chain, revocation, protocol and interoperability issues and provide technical leadership during incidents.
• Plan and execute upgrades, migrations, key ceremonies, backup and restoration validation, disaster recovery tests and service improvements with appropriate change, security and evidence controls.
• Produce and maintain engineering designs, build documentation, runbooks, test evidence and integration guidance.
• Partner with the PKI Lead, operations, architecture, security, audit, application teams and service partners; mentor engineers; review technical designs and changes; and communicate engineering risks, dependencies and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Basic Qualifications:

• Degree in a relevant discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least five years of hands-on experience engineering and supporting enterprise PKI or certificate lifecycle services, including responsibility for production design, implementation, troubleshooting and continuous improvement.
• Strong knowledge of X.509 certificates, certificate chains and path validation, enrollment, revocation, OCSP, CRLs, key management, cryptographic algorithms and core PKI security principles.
• Practical experience with Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services or a comparable enterprise certificate authority platform.
• Experience integrating certificates with Windows, Linux, network devices, applications or cloud services, including relevant dependencies on Active Directory, DNS, privileged access and service identities.
• Ability to automate technical processes using PowerShell, Python, APIs or infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience diagnosing complex production issues and implementing sustainable corrective actions.
• Strong documentation, collaboration and communication skills in a global engineering environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with certificate lifecycle management platforms and automated enrollment protocols such as SCEP, EST or ACME.
• Experience with hardware security modules, protected key operations and formal key ceremonies.
• Knowledge of cloud-native certificate services and workload identity patterns in Azure, AWS or Google Cloud.
• Experience supporting device, network, operational technology or code-signing certificate use cases.
• Familiarity with cryptographic standards, audit controls and regulated-industry requirements.
• Relevant certification in Microsoft, cloud, security or PKI technologies.

Typical tools and technologies:

Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services, enterprise certificate lifecycle management platforms, hardware security modules, Azure Key Vault, X.509, TLS, SCEP, EST, ACME, OCSP, CRLs, PowerShell, Python, REST APIs and infrastructure as code.