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 Youll 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
