Cryptography Engineer—Post‑Quantum & FPGA Focus

Intelligence Careers; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 133,000 - 197,000; Full time

Job summary

The NSA invites you to an elite research team dedicated to designing cryptography that protects the nation’s most sensitive communications. As an Engineering and Physical Sciences Researcher, you’ll translate mission needs into cryptographic solutions, partnering with customers across space and SWaP-constrained domains to prototype and evaluate new symmetric and public-key algorithms.

You will work with world-class mathematicians and engineers to shape how next-generation cryptography is

Qualifications

• Degree must be in Engineering, Physics or Astronomy or a relevant technical field.
• SENIOR Entry is Bachelor’s +7 years, Master’s +5 years, Doctoral +3 years of relevant experience.
• EXPERT Entry is Bachelor’s +10 years, Master’s +8 years, Doctoral +6 years of relevant experience.

Responsibilities

• Engage with customer organizations to elicit requirements, characterize the target system and operating environment, and communicate constraints back to the cryptographic design team
• Collaborate with mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers to develop and refine symmetric and public-key cryptographic algorithms for constrained environments
• Design, implement, and test symmetrical and public-key algorithms in hardware (FPGA) and embedded software to evaluate correctness, performance, and resource usage
• Develop reference implementations, test vectors, and harnesses to validate algorithm behavior
• Estimate and model performance (throughput, latency, memory, power, area) in customer environments and present trade studies
• Integrate cryptographic components into protocols and embedded systems and assess interface impacts
• Contribute to evaluation and transition of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms for National Security Systems
• Stay abreast of current cryptographic research and incorporate state-of-the-art techniques into designs and evaluations
• Perform side-channel analysis and apply countermeasures to produce side-channel-resistant designs

Skills

Cryptographic design

Embedded software

Hardware design

FPGA

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering/Physics/Math

Tools

HDL (Verilog/VHDL)

Job description

The NSA invites you to an elite research team dedicated to designing cryptography that protects the nation’s most sensitive communications. As an Engineering and Physical Sciences Researcher, you’ll translate mission needs into cryptographic solutions, partnering with customers across space and SWaP-constrained domains to prototype and evaluate new symmetric and public-key algorithms.

You will work with world-class mathematicians and engineers to shape how next-generation cryptography is