Senior PKI Engineer SME

Vervic Inc.; Washington; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Dental insurance

Health insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Vervic Inc. seeks a Senior PKI Engineer to own PKI architecture and lifecycle, ensuring secure certificate management across systems.

You will design trust models, issue and manage certificates, and resolve complex interoperability issues in a high-security environment. Applicants must have 8+ years PKI experience, hold a professional certification, and be capable of operating under DoD 8140 with TS/SCI consideration.

Qualifications

• 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

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.

Skills

PKI fundamentals

PKI tooling

TLS mutual auth

Revocation management

HSM

Systems integration

Tools

OpenSSL

Microsoft CA

Job description

Benefits

• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off

Senior PKI Engineer / SME Location: On-site Washington, DC

Job Duties

• 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

EOE