Cryptography Engineer

About Qorsa

Qorsa is a Canadian post-quantum cryptography and cybersecurity company building CasQade — a crypto-agile security platform protecting sovereign government, defence, financial, and critical-infrastructure networks against current and emerging cryptographic threats. We are headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, with a European subsidiary in The Hague, Netherlands. Our work spans post-quantum cryptography, explainable AI, AI-driven threat intelligence, cryptographic agility, hardware security, and distributed systems, with active engagements across Canadian defence, NATO, and allied partner organizations.

The Role

We are hiring a Cryptography Engineer to work on the cryptography at the core of CasQade, our crypto-agile security platform, and on related products including our hardware program. You will help decide which algorithms and parameters we ship, implement them correctly, and make it possible for customers to move to new algorithms without taking their systems offline.

You will work closely with our platform, security and hardware engineers.

This is frontier work. Post-quantum standards are still settling, and much of the value you bring will be judgement: knowing when a draft is stable enough to build on, and how to ship cryptography that stays correct as the algorithms underneath it change.

Responsibilities

• Implement post-quantum and hybrid algorithms (ML-KEM, ML-DSA) across our products.
• Design and build the mechanisms that let customers change cryptographic algorithms safely at scale.
• Work with hardware-backed keys, including HSMs and PKCS#11 tokens.
• Define certificate profiles and key hierarchies for post-quantum and hybrid PKI.
• Review cryptographic code across the product for correctness, constant-time behaviour and misuse of primitives.
• Write test vectors, fuzz targets and interoperability tests against other implementations.
• Follow IETF and NIST standards work and decide when a draft is stable enough to implement.
• Support FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria preparation where our products need validation.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience implementing cryptography in production software.
• A good understanding of TLS 1.3, X.509 certificate validation and public-key cryptography.
• Working knowledge of current issues in post-quantum cryptography.
• Comfort working in systems programming languages such as Rust, C or Go.
• Excellent communication skills and genuine comfort working across disciplines, with software, hardware and security engineers.
• Eligibility for Government of Canada security clearance (Secret level).

Strong Assets

• Proficiency implementing directly from RFCs and NIST specifications.
• Contributions to an open-source cryptography or TLS library.
• Experience with HSMs, PKCS#11, or cryptography on embedded or custom hardware.
• Experience writing constant-time code and reasoning about side channels.
• Experience taking a product through FIPS 140-3 or Common Criteria validation.

Compensation

We compensate exceptionally well — a strong base salary plus meaningful stock options in a rapidly growing company.

Benefits

• Dental care
• Extended health care
• Vision care
• On-site parking

Work Location: In person, Waterloo, Ontario.