Senior PKI Engineer / SME

Vervic Inc.•Washington, DC

11h•$1 - $1•Onsite

About The Position

This role focuses on designing and maintaining trust models that other systems depend on, often with little margin for error. Problems are rarely straightforward, requiring solutions that account for vendor constraints, security requirements, and interoperability edge cases. The position involves ownership of PKI architecture and implementation from policy design through operational support. The high OPTEMPO environment requires precision, persistence, and disciplined follow-through.

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
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

Responsibilities

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.