Senior PKI Engineer / SME

Senior PKI Engineer / SME
Location: On-site Washington, DC
 
Job Duties:
• Work centers on designing and maintaining trust models that other systems depend on,
often with little margin for error.
• Problems are rarely straightforward—solutions must account for vendor constraints,
security requirements, and interoperability edge cases.
• Ownership of PKI architecture and implementation from policy design through
operational support.
• High OPTEMPO; requires precision, persistence, and disciplined follow-through.
 
 
What You’ll Do
• Design and manage PKI architectures, including root/intermediate hierarchies, chains of
trust, and certificate lifecycle processes.
• Create and maintain segmented trust models (organizational partitions, cross-domain
trust, constrained intermediates).
• Generate and support certificates for diverse use cases, including handling vendor-
specific constraints and non-standard requirements (e.g., wildcard usage, SAN
configurations, custom extensions).
• Troubleshoot certificate validation issues across systems, applications, and network
boundaries.
• Collaborate with systems, network, and application teams to ensure certificates function
correctly within their environments.
• Define and enforce certificate policies, revocation strategies (CRL/OCSP), and security
controls.
• Mentor engineers on PKI fundamentals and correct implementation practices.
Tech Knowledge / Skills
• PKI fundamentals: X.509, certificate chains, trust stores, key management
• Microsoft CA, OpenSSL, and other PKI tooling
• TLS/SSL, mutual authentication, certificate-based access control
• CRL, OCSP, revocation and lifecycle management
• Hardware security module
• Integration points: web servers, load balancers, applications, network devices
 
 
Requirements
• 8+ years experience in PKI, security engineering, or related systems roles in
secure/cleared environments
• Active TS; must be able to obtain TS/SCI
• Professional certification required; expert-level capability preferred
• Demonstrated ability to design and troubleshoot PKI systems across multiple platforms
and vendors
• Experience with complex trust models and real-world certificate interoperability
challenges
• DoD 8140 compliance required

EOE