Anyone wondering if Apple was going to be cowed by the FBI’s ongoing pressures might find some relief in the company’s most recent hire: Frederic Jacobs, previously a lead developer for Signal, one of the most secure messaging apps there is.

Both Apple and Jacobs declined to comment, but the latter announced his new gig with a tweet Thursday.

He further clarified that it will be an “internship position,” though the duration and responsibilities of which remain unknown.

Jacobs spent two and a half years as a security engineer at Open Whisper Systems, the creator of Signal. He left that role in January of this year, but in his time there he worked on the end-to-end encryption for the Signal iOS app that has made it the darling of the security community. Edward Snowden has said he uses Signal “every day,” and it’s one of the few secure messaging apps that gets high marks across the board from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.

The hire comes at an auspicious time for Apple, which is currently embroiled in an ongoing legal battle with the FBI over whether law enforcement can compel the company to create software that makes its products inherently less safe. The risk of losing that fight has reportedly prompted Apple to work on enhancing its security measures even further. The ultimate goal may be a device so secure that Apple had no way to assist the FBI in future cases, even if it wanted to.

Hiring a Signal developer is a good place to start. As security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski recently pointed out, messages sent over its end-to-end encryption are largely safe even from forensics tools.

Improving security is not a new directive for Apple. It does so with virtually every release, to varying degrees. Its efforts may be ramping up a bit, though, now that it’s on the clock. And it apparently has picked up some very capable help along the way.