Senior PKI Engineer

Applications accepted here: https://www.clearancejobs.com/jobs/9056018/senior-pki-engineer-sme

Senior PKI Engineer / SME

• Location: On-site at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB)

• Clearance: Active TS; must be able to obtain TS/SCI

What This Job Feels Like

• 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

• The likely salary range for this position is $180,000-$235,000. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, and contractual agreements and could fall outside of this range.