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