PKI Operations Engineer

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.

• 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 escape risks and blockers before they impact operations

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

• Local to the DMV area with 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, ISCCertAgent 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…