Defensive Cybersecurity Engineer/Incident Response

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.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Provide subject matter expertise to government sponsors on enterprise security operations centers (SOCs), including daily operations, governance, and process improvement.
• Translate complex defensive cybersecurity concepts into practical training tailored to sponsors' network topologies, staffing, funding, and technical resources.
• Develop hands-on training scenarios and exercises that reflect real-world incident response challenges and sponsor mission needs.
• Help sponsors develop, assess, and improve incident response plans, playbooks, and workflows for investigating, containing, and recovering from cyber incidents.
• Apply MITRE ATT&CK to characterize adversary behavior, support incident investigations, and identify opportunities to strengthen defenses.
• Design, develop, and refine security detections, analytics, and dashboards, and integrate new data sources into security information and event management (SIEM) platforms.
• Analyze and correlate endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry to determine incident scope, assess impact, and inform containment and remediation recommendations.
• Assess SOC and incident response capabilities, identify operational and technical gaps, and recommend improvements aligned with sponsor mission priorities and available resources.
• Support post-incident reviews and exercises, translating lessons learned into improvements to response procedures, detection coverage, and operational readiness.
• Research and evaluate emerging artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning and generative AI, with an emphasis on practical, cost-effective applications to SOC operations and incident response.

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.
• Must have a minimum of 3 years of operational experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
• Knowledge of incident response operations, principles, and their application.
• Demonstrated knowledge of and hands-on experience with generative AI or AI-enabled technologies, with the ability to apply these capabilities to cybersecurity investigation, incident response, threat analysis, or security automation.
• Experience developing technical training content, curriculum, courseware, or other learning materials for cybersecurity audiences.
• Strong technical writing, presentation, and facilitation skills.
• Ability and willingness to travel up to 25% to deliver training at customer locations, including international locations.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Top Secret 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 requires a minimum of 3 days per week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications

• Comfort presenting to non-English-speaking audiences with translation support.
• Experience applying MITRE ATT&CK to support cybersecurity operations.
• Experience leading incident response efforts and teams within a security operations center, incident response organization, or fly-away team.
• Experience developing incident response playbooks, tabletop exercises, or operational training scenarios.
• Experience leading technical training sessions for government, partner, or other technical audiences.
• Experience creating hands-on cybersecurity labs, exercises, or scenario-based learning materials.
• Experience with Splunk or Elastic/ELK.
• Experience integrating AI-enabled workflows with cybersecurity platforms such as SIEM, SOAR, EDR/XDR, threat-intelligence, case-management, or cloud-security platforms.