Job Description
acuCyber is seeking a Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) Subject Matter Expert to guide strategy and architecture for secure mission services operating under constrained connectivity. This role focuses on operating at the intersection of tactical communications, systems engineering, and advanced cybersecurity, this role addresses the unique technical challenges of enforcing Zero Trust principles (continuous verification, least privilege access, explicit risk-based attestation) when continuous reachback to enterprise identity providers, policy engines, and cloud trust brokers is degraded or entirely severed. The engineer will establish resilient Policy Enforcement Points (PEP) and decentralized Policy Decision Points (PDP), architect edge-capable Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) solutions, and optimize cryptographic overhead across constrained tactical data links.
We are looking for someone who has designed, evaluated, or fielded systems for these conditions and understands the tradeoffs involved. The SME will help Government stakeholders and engineering teams determine which capabilities must operate locally, what information can be cached or replicated, how long that information remains trustworthy, and how systems reconnect safely. Success requires sound technical judgment grounded in mission needs and experience beyond traditional enterprise availability planning.
This is a full-time, on-site role at a Government facility in Charleston, SC or the National Capital Region (NCR).
What You'll Do:
• Develop DDIL strategies, architectural approaches, and implementation roadmaps for mission applications and supporting security services.
• Work with mission owners to define operational scenarios, connectivity constraints, mission priorities, and acceptable levels of degraded service.
• Translate those scenarios into requirements for local autonomy, bandwidth use, latency, outage duration, synchronization, and recovery.
• Define which identity, authorization, directory, credential, and data protection capabilities must remain available without enterprise reach back.
• Architect local identity and attribute services, including virtual directories and approved caching of security information.
• Establish approaches for cached attribute freshness, credential expiration, revocation awareness, authorization policy updates, and operation when authoritative sources cannot be reached.
• Evaluate access control tradeoffs, including when services should deny access, permit bounded local operation, or require additional safeguards.
• Design synchronization and reconnection approaches that address conflicting updates, stale identity data, audit records, and restoration of enterprise consistency.
• Define dependencies among applications, identity providers, policy services, directories, encryption services, and key management infrastructure.
• Assess data placement, replication, and protection requirements across connected and disconnected environments, including approved cross-domain interfaces.
• Develop architecture diagrams, interface requirements, alternatives analyses, risk assessments, and phased implementation recommendations.
• Support agreements and approval documentation governing the caching and use of identity and security attributes.
• Guide prototypes and demonstrations that validate architectural assumptions under representative network impairments.
• Define measurable acceptance criteria and help teams evaluate mission continuity, security behavior, and recovery during connectivity loss and restoration.
• Coordinate with Government stakeholders, mission partners, security personnel, and engineering teams to resolve architectural gaps and guide implementation.
Required Skills
• Active Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance with ability to obtain a Counterintelligence (CI) Polygraph.
• Demonstrated subject matter expertise designing, evaluating, or fielding systems that operate with denied, disrupted, intermittent, or limited connectivity.
• Experience developing mission or enterprise architectures that support disconnected operation, local processing, and eventual synchronization with authoritative services.
• Ability to translate operational constraints into technical requirements, architectural decisions, and testable performance criteria
• Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, replication, caching, conflict resolution, and failure recovery.
• Experience addressing identity, authentication, authorization, or credential dependencies when enterprise services are unavailable.
• Understanding of the security implications of stale attributes, delayed revocation information, expired credentials, and unavailable policy or key services.
• Experience assessing bandwidth, latency, packet loss, and network availability constraints and their effects on application and service behavior.
• Experience developing technical strategies, architecture documentation, alternatives analyses, and implementation roadmaps.
• Ability to explain architectural tradeoffs and residual risks to Government decision-makers and provide actionable guidance to engineering teams.
• Experience working across mission, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and application development stakeholders.
• Experience deploying localized Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) and lightweight Policy Decision Points (PDPs) on edge compute appliances and dismounted kits.
• Experience conducting modeling, simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) testing to replicate tactical link degradation, electronic warfare (EW) effects, and packet-loss profiles.
Desired Skills
• Prior experience supporting the Intelligence Community.
• Bachelors or Masters degree
• Operational DDIL experience: Experience supporting deployed, tactical, expeditionary, edge, or other mission environments with constrained reach back.
• Identity services: Experience with Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM), virtual directories, identity federation, and local identity and attribute caching.
• Authorization design: Experience with attribute-based access control, local policy enforcement, bounded offline access, and synchronization of authorization policies.
• Data protection: Familiarity with Trusted Data Format (TDF), data tagging, encryption, and access enforcement when central services are unavailable.
• Key and certificate services: Experience addressing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), certificate validation, credential renewal, and key availability in disconnected environments.
• Distributed applications: Experience with store-and-forward messaging, durable queues, retry behavior, duplicate handling, and reconciliation after reconnection.
• Cross-domain environments: Experience defining approved identity and data exchanges across security domains and mission partner boundaries.
• Cloud and edge platforms: Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and deployment patterns spanning enterprise and local infrastructure.
• Validation and experimentation: Experience using network impairment testing, fault injection, or operational demonstrations to assess degraded-mode behavior.
• Zero Trust: Experience adapting identity, device, application, and data security controls to environments where continuous enterprise connectivity cannot be assumed.
• Segmentation: Experience implementing software-defined micro segmentation, overlay networks, and dynamic perimeter controls across non-standard transport channels (e.g., HF/VHF/UHF, SATCOM, mesh radios, 5G tactical bubbles).
Additional Details
• Competitive compensation and performance incentives
• Full benefits package: health, dental, vision, 401(k) with match
• Paid time off and short-term disability coverage
• Purpose-driven, clearance-respecting culture
• Opportunities for professional growth and leadership
