Infrastructure Engineer/Architect - DDIL SME

Mantis Security Corporation•Reston, VA

About The Position

Mantis Security is seeking a Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) Subject Matter Expert to guide strategy and architecture for secure mission services operating under constrained connectivity. The role works at the intersection of tactical communications, systems engineering, and advanced cybersecurity, addressing the challenges of enforcing Zero Trust principles when enterprise identity providers, policy engines, and cloud trust brokers are degraded or unavailable. The engineer will establish resilient Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) and decentralized Policy Decision Points (PDPs), architect edge-capable Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) solutions, and optimize cryptographic overhead across constrained tactical data links. The SME will advise Government stakeholders and engineering teams on which capabilities must operate locally, what information may be cached or replicated, how long it remains trustworthy, and how systems can reconnect safely. Success requires technical judgment grounded in mission needs and experience beyond traditional enterprise availability planning.

Requirements

Active Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance with ability to obtain a Counterintelligence (CI) Polygraph.
Demonstrated subject matter expertise designing, evaluating, or fielding systems that operate with denied, disrupted, intermittent, or limited connectivity.
Experience developing mission or enterprise architectures that support disconnected operation, local processing, and eventual synchronization with authoritative services.
Ability to translate operational constraints into technical requirements, architectural decisions, and testable performance criteria.
Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, replication, caching, conflict resolution, and failure recovery.
Experience addressing identity, authentication, authorization, or credential dependencies when enterprise services are unavailable.
Understanding of security implications of stale attributes, delayed revocation information, expired credentials, and unavailable policy or key services.
Experience assessing bandwidth, latency, packet loss, and network availability constraints and their effects on application and service behavior.
Experience developing technical strategies, architecture documentation, alternatives analyses, and implementation roadmaps.
Ability to explain architectural tradeoffs and residual risks to Government decision-makers and provide actionable guidance to engineering teams.
Experience working across mission, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and application development stakeholders.
Experience deploying localized Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) and lightweight Policy Decision Points (PDPs) on edge compute appliances and dismounted kits.
Experience conducting modeling, simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) testing to replicate tactical link degradation, electronic warfare (EW) effects, and packet-loss profiles.

Nice To Haves

Operational DDIL experience supporting deployed, tactical, expeditionary, edge, or other mission environments with constrained reachback.
Experience with ICAM, virtual directories, identity federation, and local identity and attribute caching.
Experience with attribute-based access control, local policy enforcement, bounded offline access, and synchronization of authorization policies.
Familiarity with Trusted Data Format (TDF), data tagging, encryption, and access enforcement when central services are unavailable.
Experience addressing PKI, certificate validation, credential renewal, and key availability in disconnected environments.
Experience with store-and-forward messaging, durable queues, retry behavior, duplicate handling, and reconciliation after reconnection.
Experience defining approved identity and data exchanges across security domains and mission partner boundaries.
Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and deployment patterns spanning enterprise and local infrastructure.
Experience using network impairment testing, fault injection, or operational demonstrations to assess degraded-mode behavior.
Experience adapting identity, device, application, and data security controls to environments where continuous enterprise connectivity cannot be assumed.
Experience implementing software-defined microsegmentation, overlay networks, and dynamic perimeter controls across non-standard transport channels such as HF/VHF/UHF, SATCOM, mesh radios, and 5G tactical bubbles.

Responsibilities

Develop DDIL strategies, architectural approaches, and implementation roadmaps for mission applications and supporting security services.
Work with mission owners to define operational scenarios, connectivity constraints, mission priorities, and acceptable levels of degraded service.
Translate scenarios into requirements for local autonomy, bandwidth use, latency, outage duration, synchronization, and recovery.
Define identity, authorization, directory, credential, and data-protection capabilities that must remain available without enterprise reachback.
Architect local identity and attribute services, including virtual directories and approved caching of security information.
Establish approaches for cached attribute freshness, credential expiration, revocation awareness, authorization policy updates, and operation when authoritative sources cannot be reached.
Evaluate access-control tradeoffs, including when services should deny access, permit bounded local operation, or require additional safeguards.
Design synchronization and reconnection approaches that address conflicting updates, stale identity data, audit records, and restoration of enterprise consistency.
Define dependencies among applications, identity providers, policy services, directories, encryption services, and key-management infrastructure.
Assess data placement, replication, and protection requirements across connected and disconnected environments, including approved cross-domain interfaces.
Develop architecture diagrams, interface requirements, alternatives analyses, risk assessments, and phased implementation recommendations.
Support agreements and approval documentation governing the caching and use of identity and security attributes.
Guide prototypes and demonstrations that validate architectural assumptions under representative network impairments.
Define measurable acceptance criteria and help teams evaluate mission continuity, security behavior, and recovery during connectivity loss and restoration.
Coordinate with Government stakeholders, mission partners, security personnel, and engineering teams to resolve architectural gaps and guide implementation.