PKI / Certificate Management Engineer (R-00198)

True Zero Technologies, a veteran-owned small business, was founded on the principle that the purposeful enablement of people and technology in an organization directly ties to the quality of its outcomes. True Zero recognizes that those outcomes begin and end with our people, and that is what we have built a community of like-minded, driven, and passionate individuals and innovators who are aligned in a common goal of delivering top-tier services to our customers. Our culture and commitment have been recognized through numerous accolades, including being named one of the Best Places to Work in 2023 in two categories (“Prosperous and Thriving” ($5MM-$50MM in gross revenue) and “Mid-Atlantic Region” (DC, DE, MD, NC, VA, WV)), and again in 2025 as a Best Places to Work honoree. In addition, True Zero earned coveted spots on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America in 2022, 2023, and 2025, a testament to our sustained growth driven by our people-first approach and unwavering dedication to excellence.

The PKI / Certificate Management Engineer designs, deploys, and maintains a secure, scalable Public Key Infrastructure supporting enterprise, cloud, government, and hybrid environments. The role is responsible for automating certificate issuance and renewal, managing certificate lifecycles across Windows, Linux, cloud platforms, containers, applications, and network devices, and establishing governance and monitoring processes that reduce the risk of certificate-related outages.

This position supports the Zero Trust architecture through certificate-based authentication, encryption, workload identity, and secure communications. The engineer will also support Federal PKI and DoD PKI integrations, CAC/PIV authentication, mutual TLS, FIPS-validated cryptography, hardware security modules, and cloud-native certificate services in AWS GovCloud.

Job Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain enterprise Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) supporting internal and external certificate requirements.
• Manage the full certificate lifecycle, including request, issuance, validation, distribution, renewal, revocation, expiration, and retirement.
• Implement and maintain ACME-based certificate automation and other automated enrollment and renewal workflows.
• Manage certificates across Windows, Linux, cloud platforms, containers, applications, load balancers, network devices, and other enterprise systems.
• Design and operate integrations with AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA), AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and related AWS services.
• Implement and administer Hardware Security Module (HSM) capabilities, including AWS CloudHSM, for secure protection of private keys and cryptographic operations.
• Support Federal PKI (FPKI) and DoD PKI trust relationships, certificate chains, and interoperability requirements.
• Integrate CAC/PIV authentication with enterprise applications, identity platforms, operating systems, and secure access workflows.
• Implement and maintain mutual TLS (mTLS) for workload identity, service-to-service authentication, and Zero Trust communications.
• Ensure cryptographic implementations use FIPS-validated cryptographic modules and approved algorithms where required.
• Establish certificate discovery, inventory, monitoring, and alerting capabilities to identify unmanaged certificates and prevent expiration-related outages.
• Develop governance standards for certificate ownership, issuance, naming, key length, cryptographic algorithms, renewal periods, revocation, and retention.
• Integrate certificate management with Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms and authentication workflows.
• Support secure networking and communications through TLS, mTLS, certificate-based authentication, and encryption standards.
• Monitor PKI platform health, certificate status, revocation services, HSM operations, and certificate expiration events.
• Troubleshoot complex certificate-chain, trust-store, TLS, cryptographic, enrollment, renewal, and authentication issues.
• Partner with cybersecurity, identity, cloud, platform, network, and application teams to integrate PKI services into enterprise architectures and deployment workflows.
• Maintain PKI architecture documentation, certificate policies, operational procedures, runbooks, governance standards, and audit evidence.

Job Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.
• Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, or administering enterprise Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
• Strong knowledge of X.509 certificates, certificate authorities, trust chains, cryptographic algorithms, key management, revocation, and certificate lifecycle management.
• Experience implementing automated certificate issuance and renewal using ACME or comparable certificate automation technologies.
• Experience managing certificates across Windows, Linux, cloud, containerized, network, and application environments.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Private CA, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudHSM, or comparable cloud PKI and HSM technologies.
• Strong understanding of cryptography, encryption, digital signatures, hashing, key exchange, and secure communications.
• Experience integrating PKI with IAM, directory services, applications, network infrastructure, and cloud services.
• Familiarity with Federal PKI, DoD PKI, CAC/PIV authentication, and government certificate trust models.
• Experience implementing mTLS and certificate-based workload identity in Zero Trust architectures.
• Familiarity with FIPS-validated cryptography and cryptographic requirements for government or regulated environments.
• Experience with certificate discovery, inventory management, expiration monitoring, and proactive renewal processes.
• Strong understanding of TLS configuration, secure networking, trust stores, certificate validation, and PKI troubleshooting.
• Experience supporting AWS GovCloud, government, defense, or other regulated environments is preferred.
• Strong governance, risk management, documentation, troubleshooting, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Certifications:

• AWS Certified Security - Specialty
• Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert (SC-100)
• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
• Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate
• Entrust or DigiCert PKI certifications, where applicable