Senior Certificate Lifecycle Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior Certificate Lifecycle Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through disciplined contract management, operational excellence, risk management, and collaborative project delivery. Our distributed teams work across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to maintain secure, reliable, and resilient business operations.

As our organization expands its digital capabilities, we recognize the importance of strong identity assurance, trusted digital communications, secure system authentication, and reliable cryptographic controls. Digital certificates play a critical role in protecting business applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, network communications, and sensitive project information.

We are committed to strengthening cybersecurity through effective certificate governance, automation, continuous monitoring, and standardized lifecycle management practices that reduce operational risk and support business continuity.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Certificate Lifecycle Specialist to oversee the lifecycle management of digital certificates across enterprise infrastructure, applications, networks, cloud environments, endpoints, and business-critical systems.

The successful candidate will manage certificate discovery, inventory, enrollment, issuance, renewal, deployment, validation, revocation, and retirement while ensuring that certificates remain secure, valid, correctly configured, and aligned with organizational policies.

This role will collaborate closely with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Cybersecurity, Information Security, Network, Infrastructure, Cloud, Application, DevOps, Identity and Access Management, and Service Management teams to establish consistent certificate management processes and reduce the risks associated with expired, misconfigured, unauthorized, or compromised certificates.

The ideal candidate will possess strong knowledge of certificate authorities, certificate enrollment protocols, public key cryptography, certificate automation platforms, TLS/SSL, enterprise PKI, and certificate monitoring solutions. The role requires a proactive professional who can improve lifecycle automation, resolve complex certificate issues, maintain audit-ready documentation, and support secure digital operations across a distributed enterprise environment.

Key Responsibilities1. Enterprise Certificate Lifecycle Management

• Manage the complete lifecycle of digital certificates, including discovery, registration, enrollment, issuance, deployment, renewal, validation, revocation, archival, and retirement.
• Establish standardized processes for requesting, approving, issuing, installing, renewing, and decommissioning certificates.
• Maintain consistent lifecycle controls across production, development, testing, staging, disaster recovery, and other enterprise environments.
• Ensure certificates are issued only for approved purposes, authorized identities, verified domains, and legitimate system requirements.
• Monitor certificate validity periods, expiration dates, renewal windows, and lifecycle status to prevent unexpected service disruptions.
• Coordinate certificate renewals and replacements with application owners, infrastructure teams, system administrators, and service providers.
• Verify that certificates are correctly installed and associated with the appropriate private keys, services, domains, and trust chains.
• Ensure certificate lifecycle activities are documented, traceable, and performed according to approved procedures.
• Establish procedures for handling certificates that are expired, revoked, compromised, misconfigured, or no longer required.
• Identify and eliminate manual lifecycle practices that introduce avoidable operational risk.
• Develop repeatable certificate management processes that support service reliability and reduce administrative overhead.
• Maintain clear ownership and accountability for certificates used by critical business systems.

2. Certificate Discovery and Inventory Management

• Discover digital certificates across servers, network devices, endpoints, databases, applications, cloud platforms, load balancers, web services, and other technology assets.
• Maintain a centralized inventory of certificates, including subject names, subject alternative names, issuers, serial numbers, fingerprints, validity periods, key algorithms, key sizes, and deployment locations.
• Record certificate ownership, business purpose, system dependencies, environment, renewal method, and responsible technical contacts.
• Identify unmanaged, undocumented, orphaned, duplicated, unauthorized, and unapproved certificates.
• Detect certificates issued by unknown or untrusted authorities and coordinate appropriate investigation.
• Identify certificates approaching expiration and prioritize remediation based on business criticality and operational impact.
• Establish processes for reconciling certificate inventories with configuration management databases, cloud asset inventories, and infrastructure records.
• Implement regular discovery scans and inventory validation procedures.
• Investigate discrepancies between certificate monitoring tools and actual certificate deployments.
• Maintain accurate records of certificates used by construction project platforms, engineering systems, procurement applications, financial services, collaboration tools, and other business-critical environments.
• Develop reporting mechanisms that provide visibility into certificate ownership, lifecycle status, risk exposure, and renewal requirements.
• Review inventory completeness periodically and address gaps in certificate discovery coverage.

3. Public Key Infrastructure and Certificate Authority Administration

• Support the administration and operational management of enterprise Public Key Infrastructure environments.
• Coordinate with internal and external Certificate Authorities (CAs) for certificate issuance, renewal, revocation, and policy administration.
• Maintain accurate records of trusted root certificates, intermediate certificates, issuing authorities, and certificate chain dependencies.
• Support the configuration and maintenance of enterprise certificate authority services in accordance with approved security requirements.
• Assist with certificate authority hierarchy design, trust relationships, and certificate issuance policies.
• Verify that certificate issuance follows approved validation procedures and authorization requirements.
• Support certificate templates, enrollment profiles, issuance restrictions, and role-based administrative controls.
• Review CA configurations to identify excessive permissions, weak issuance policies, inappropriate trust relationships, and unnecessary certificate issuance capabilities.
• Coordinate certificate authority maintenance, upgrades, migration activities, and configuration changes.
• Assist with the secure management of CA signing certificates and associated private keys in collaboration with key management and cryptographic security teams.
• Support the transition between certificate authorities when required by security, business, or technology changes.
• Maintain documentation covering PKI architecture, certificate authority responsibilities, trust chains, operational procedures, and recovery arrangements.
• Ensure that certificate authority operations are monitored, documented, and periodically reviewed.

4. Certificate Enrollment, Issuance, and Validation

• Manage and troubleshoot certificate enrollment processes for users, devices, servers, applications, and services.
• Support certificate enrollment through approved protocols and mechanisms, including Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME), Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), and Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP), where applicable.
• Support other enterprise enrollment mechanisms, including certificate enrollment web services and platform-specific automated enrollment capabilities.
• Validate certificate requests against approved subject names, domain ownership, identity attributes, key usage, and organizational authorization requirements.
• Verify that certificates contain appropriate Extended Key Usage, Key Usage, Subject Alternative Name, validity, and policy attributes.
• Ensure that certificates are issued using approved cryptographic algorithms and key parameters.
• Investigate failed enrollment requests, issuance delays, validation errors, and certificate policy conflicts.
• Coordinate with DNS, domain administration, application, and infrastructure teams to resolve certificate validation and ownership issues.
• Ensure that certificate requests and issuance events are logged and linked to appropriate change or service requests.
• Validate complete certificate chains and confirm that certificates chain to approved trust anchors.
• Identify incorrect certificate attributes, unsupported algorithms, incomplete chains, and trust configuration problems.
• Ensure certificate requests are not approved solely on the basis of technical availability when required authorization or identity verification is missing.