Defensive Cybersecurity Engineer/Blue Team

Department Summary

MITRE's Defensive Cyber Operations department is seeking creative people to work collaboratively with our staff of cybersecurity engineers in the fields of defensive cyber operations, threat hunt, detection engineering, and cyber deception and adversary engagement with increasing emphasis in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support mission-driven cybersecurity initiatives for government sponsors.

This role blends hands-on defensive operations with advanced research and applied development in AI-enabled cybersecurity. The successful candidate will help design, implement, and evaluate next-generation defensive capabilities that leverage machine learning, large language models, autonomous systems, and advanced analytics to protect mission-critical systems and national infrastructure.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Combining cybersecurity domain expertise and contemporary data science skills to enhance adversary detection, network defense, and Security Operations Center (SOC) process improvement.
• Developing AI-enabled cybersecurity tools for anomaly detection, behavioral analytics, malware analysis, and adversary emulation.
• Researching emerging AI techniques (e.g., machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, reinforcement learning) and assessing their applicability to defensive cyber missions.
• Using MITRE ATT&CK to hunt the adversary and build TTP-based defenses.
• Using detection engineering to create security analytics and dashboards in Splunk or Elastic and integrating new data feeds.
• Automating container environments via continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
• Acting as a trusted advisor to the Federal Government.

Basic Qualifications

• Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 6 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 3 years' experience; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
• Significant experience with Splunk and cloud computing.
• Knowledge of cyber security operations and cyber security principles and their application.
• Experience in at least one of: Security Operations Centers (SOCs), threat hunting, detection engineering, malware analysis, or cyber deception.
• Applicants selected for this position will be subject to a government clearance security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.
• Must have an active Top Secret/SCI with polygraph U.S Government issued Security Clearance. Per the U.S. Government's eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
• This position has an on-site requirement of 5 days a week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Elastic/ELK.
• Experience using MITRE ATT&CK.
• Experience using or developing AI tools and techniques for defensive cyber operations.