Requisition ID: 107546-1
Title: Certificate Lifecycle/ PKI Engineer with Venafi Expertise
Location: Chicago, IL
Duration: 6+ Months
Salary Range: $60- $62 an hour on W2 /C2C
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior PKI & Venafi Engineer with 10+ years of experience in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), Venafi, and certificate automation. The engineer will serve as a subject matter expert responsible for enterprise certificate management, Venafi platform administration, application onboarding, automation, PKI operations, governance, and platform resiliency across hybrid and cloud environments.
The ideal candidate will work closely with application, infrastructure, cloud, security, and architecture teams to ensure certificates are securely issued, deployed, monitored, renewed, and retired throughout their lifecycle.
Key Responsibilities
Certificate Lifecycle Management
- Administer and support enterprise Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) services.
- Manage the complete certificate lifecycle, including:
- Discovery
- Request and issuance
- Renewal
- Revocation
- Deployment
- Monitoring
- Retirement
- Maintain enterprise certificate inventory, ownership, and visibility.
- Identify and remediate expired, unmanaged, self-signed, and non-compliant certificates.
- Ensure certificates comply with enterprise security standards and industry requirements.
Venafi Platform Administration
- Administer and maintain the Venafi Trust Protection Platform and supporting infrastructure.
- Configure and manage Venafi:
- Policies
- Workflows
- Certificate Authorities
- Integrations
- Discovery jobs
- Notifications
- Reporting
- Access controls
- Support Venafi platform upgrades, maintenance, enhancements, and technology refresh activities.
- Work with Venafi support and vendors to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues.
Application Onboarding
- Lead application onboarding into the enterprise Certificate Lifecycle Management platform.
- Assess application certificate requirements and define appropriate onboarding approaches.
- Design certificate deployment and automation patterns based on application architecture.
- Collaborate with application teams to understand certificate formats, trust requirements, deployment architecture, and operational processes.
- Support onboarding across Windows, Linux, Azure, Kubernetes, WebLogic, IIS, F5, Kafka, Solace, Ping, and cloud-native platforms.
- Provide technical consultation and recommendations to application teams.
Certificate Automation
- Design, develop, and support automated certificate lifecycle solutions.
- Build automation using:
- Venafi Native Drivers
- Venafi APIs
- vCert utilities
- CI/CD pipelines
- GitHub Actions
- Azure DevOps
- PowerShell
- Python
- Ansible
- Automate certificate renewal, provisioning, deployment validation, and application restart processes.
- Reduce manual certificate management and associated operational risks.
- Develop reusable automation frameworks and onboarding patterns.
PKI Operations & Resiliency
- Support enterprise PKI infrastructure and Certificate Authority (CA) services.
- Support CA operations, CRL publication, backup/recovery testing, and disaster recovery exercises.
- Manage root and intermediate certificates.
- Monitor PKI and certificate ecosystem health and availability.
- Participate in platform resiliency and high-availability initiatives.
- Provide technical support during major incidents and certificate-related outages.
Security & Governance
- Support certificate governance, compliance, and security initiatives.
- Maintain certificate ownership, metadata, and accountability records.
- Ensure adherence to security standards for TLS/SSL, certificate issuance, cryptographic key management, and Certificate Authority controls.
- Assist with certificate-related risk remediation and security audits.
Required Skills
- 10+ years of experience in PKI, certificate management, cybersecurity, or related infrastructure engineering.
- Strong hands-on experience with Venafi Trust Protection Platform.
- Strong understanding of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Lifecycle Management.
- Experience managing certificate discovery, issuance, renewal, revocation, deployment, and retirement.
- Experience with Certificate Authorities, root/intermediate certificates, CRLs, TLS/SSL, and cryptographic keys.
- Strong experience with certificate automation and application onboarding.
- Experience with Client Azure and cloud certificate management.
- Experience with Venafi APIs, vCert, and automation tools.
- Strong scripting/programming experience with PowerShell and/or Python.
- Experience with Ansible, GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps.
- Experience supporting Windows and Linux environments.
- Strong troubleshooting, incident management, documentation, and communication skills.
Preferred Skills
- Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native platforms.
- Experience onboarding applications such as IIS, WebLogic, F5, Kafka, Solace, and Ping.
- Experience designing reusable certificate automation frameworks.
- Knowledge of enterprise security and certificate governance standards.
- Experience with PKI disaster recovery and resiliency.
- Experience working with application, infrastructure, cloud, and security architecture teams.
Essential Skills: Client Azure, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Venafi, Certificate Lifecycle Management