PKI Operations Engineer

Fort Meade, MD
Full Time
Mid Level

PKI Operations Engineer 

Ft. Meade, MD — Full Time (Hybrid) 

August Schell is looking for a PKI Operations Engineer to sustain and operate DoD enterprise Public Key Infrastructure in support of our DISA customer. This is a Red Hat Certificate System (RHCS) solution. Where our PKI Software Engineer builds the next-generation certificate-systems code, this role keeps the infrastructure running: operating and hardening the live RHCS environment, standing up new customers and enclaves, driving CVE remediation and patch cycles, monitoring system health, and automating the operational toil that keeps a high-volume CA reliable. The engineer works hand-in-hand with commercial product engineering, government operations teams, and other program contractors — including through the environment's post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. 

Individuals in this role must be able to work hybrid and go on site at Fort Meade as requested. 

Responsibilities Include 

  • Operate and sustain the production PKI environment on Red Hat Certificate System (RHCS) — CA availability, certificate lifecycle operations, and the day-to-day health of the issuance pipeline 

  • Run RA/CRL/OCSP operations and certificate lifecycle management, including the transition to shorter-lived certificates at higher issuance volume (ACME automation) 

  • Onboard new customers, enclaves, and use cases onto the PKI — configuration, integration, and secure hardening of new environments to program standards 

  • Own CVE remediation and patch management for the PKI stack and its underlying RHEL hosts — track, test, schedule, and apply security patches with minimal disruption to CA operations 

  • Monitor system health and performance; build and maintain alerting, logging, and dashboards; respond to and resolve operational incidents, and lead root-cause analysis 

  • Operate and troubleshoot HSM integrations (Entrust nShield / Thales Luna) supporting CA operations and key escrow 

  • Automate operational tasks — health checks, backups, certificate/CRL monitoring, deployment and configuration — using scripting and CI/CD tooling to reduce toil and manual error 

  • Support the program's PQC migration from an operations standpoint (algorithm rollout, version transition, validation in the live environment) 

  • Provide development support in an operational capacity as additional value — small fixes, config-as-code, tooling, and reproduction of issues for the product engineering team — without owning the core feature-development backlog 

  • Communicate clearly across government operations stakeholders, commercial vendor engineering, and program contractors; document runbooks and escalate risks and blockers before they impact operations 

Requirements 

  • Active Secret clearance minimum (Top Secret preferred and may be required) 

  • Local to the DMV area with the ability to work on site at Fort Meade as requested 

  • Five (5)+ years of relevant systems/operations engineering experience (flexible for candidates with exceptional PKI depth) 

  • Strong Linux (RHEL) systems administration and operations background, including patch management and system hardening 

  • Knowledge or experience with Linux containers and container orchestration (Podman / Docker) and VMs (KVM) 

  • Hands-on experience operating PKI, x.509, cryptography, and system/software security technologies 

  • Direct experience operating Red Hat Certificate System (RHCS) — this is a Red Hat solution. Dogtag PKI experience (RHCS's upstream open-source project) is an accepted alternative skillset, as is comparable enterprise CA platform operations (EJBCA, Microsoft AD CS, Entrust Authority, ISC CertAgent, or similar) 

  • Scripting/automation proficiency (Python, Bash, or similar) for operational tooling 

  • DoD 8570/8140 IAT Level II certification (Security+ or equivalent) 

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a habit of documenting runbooks and operational procedures 

Stand Out With 

  • Prior DISA or DoD PKI program operations experience (Purebred, derived credentials, RA/CRL/OCSP operations at scale) 

  • HSM operations experience (Entrust nShield, Thales Luna) — the customer runs Entrust HSMs 

  • ACME protocol and certificate automation at scale 

  • Post-quantum cryptography familiarity (ML-DSA/Dilithium, Kyber, CNSA 2.0 timelines) from a migration/operations lens 

  • Configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, or similar) 

  • Directory Server / LDAP operations experience 

  • Monitoring/observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK, or similar) and incident response 

  • Agile / ITSM operating rhythms (Scrum, JIRA, change management) 

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