PKI Software Engineer
August Schell Enterprises4 months ago
Fort Meade, MD, USASenior
Base Salary
$140k - $170k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, test, and maintain PKI software components across Red Hat Certificate System and Dogtag PKI.
- Implement software fixes and feature development with product engineering and government development teams, owning issues from requirements through testing and verification.
- Support post-quantum cryptography migration, including ML-DSA integration and legacy-version transition planning.
- Develop and troubleshoot HSM integrations for certificate authority operations and key escrow.
- Support ACME-based certificate lifecycle automation as certificate lifetimes shorten and issuance volume increases.
- Contribute to defensive programming, testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and release quality.
- Communicate technical status and program risks across government, vendor engineering, and contractor stakeholders.
Requirements
- Active Secret clearance is required; Top Secret clearance is preferred and may be required.
- Local to the DMV area and able to work on site at Fort Meade as requested.
- Five or more years of professional software engineering experience, with flexibility for exceptional PKI depth.
- Experience programming in Java and/or Rust.
- Strong knowledge of Linux and Linux development tools.
- Knowledge or experience with Podman or Docker, container orchestration, and KVM virtual machines.
- Hands-on experience with PKI, X.509, cryptography, and system or software security technologies.
- Direct experience with Red Hat Certificate System or Dogtag PKI; comparable enterprise CA platforms such as EJBCA, Microsoft AD CS, Entrust Authority, or ISC CertAgent may be considered.
- DoD 8570/8140 IAT Level II certification, such as Security+ or equivalent.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Preferred experience includes post-quantum cryptography, ML-DSA/Dilithium, Kyber, CNSA 2.0 timelines, HSMs, ACME at scale, DISA or DoD PKI programs, Directory Server/LDAP, AI agents for development, Python, Bash, Fedora/RHEL package maintenance, Scrum, and JIRA.
Benefits
- Full-time hybrid work arrangement in the DMV area with on-site work at Fort Meade as requested.
About August Schell Enterprises
August Schell Enterprises provides cybersecurity consulting and systems integration for enterprises and U.S. government agencies, with offerings spanning identity management, cloud and data center security, endpoint management, and security event monitoring. The privately held firm, founded in 1991 and headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, designs and implements secure on‑premises and cloud environments. Its teams often support cleared federal initiatives in enterprise security architecture, compliance, and secure system implementation.