Senior PKI Engineer

99999 Consulting, LLC; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

99999 Consulting, LLC is seeking a senior PKI engineer to design and manage trusted PKI infrastructures. You will own certificate lifecycles, policies, and interoperability across diverse platforms, ensuring secure, scalable trust.

Applicants should have 8+ years in PKI/security roles in cleared environments, with TS clearance and professional certification. Expect collaboration with systems and network teams, and mentoring of engineers in best practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing or operating PKI/security systems in secure environments.
• Active TS; ability to obtain TS/SCI.
• Professional certification; expert-level capability preferred.
• Proven ability to design and troubleshoot PKI across multiple platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design and manage PKI architectures, root/intermediate hierarchies, and certificate lifecycles.
• Create segmented trust models and cross-domain trust configurations.
• Generate and support certificates for diverse use cases with vendor constraints.
• Troubleshoot certificate validation across systems and networks.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure proper certificate operation.
• Define certificate policies, revocation strategies, and security controls.
• Mentor engineers on PKI fundamentals and best practices.

Skills

PKI design

Security engineering

Certificate management

TLS/SSL

Cross-platform troubleshooting

Education

Security certification

Tools

Microsoft CA

OpenSSL

PKI tooling

Job description

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.
• 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

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

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.