Defensive Cybersecurity Engineer/SOC SME

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 defensive cyber challenges and sponsor mission needs.
• Apply MITRE ATT&CK to guide threat hunting and develop defenses aligned with adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
• Design, develop, and refine security detections, analytics, and dashboards, and integrate new data sources into security information and event management (SIEM) platforms.
• Develop, evaluate, and improve threat hunting methodologies to identify adversary activity and strengthen defensive cyber capabilities.
• Research and evaluate emerging artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on practical, cost-effective applications to daily SOC operations.
• Assess SOC capabilities, identify operational and technical gaps, and recommend improvements aligned with sponsor mission priorities and available resources.
• Validate detections and defensive workflows through testing and exercises, using results to improve detection coverage, reduce false positives, and refine operational procedures.

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.
• Experience in leveraging common SOC tools to defend an enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated experience conducting proactive cyber threat hunting across enterprise environments.
• 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

• 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.
• Comfort presenting to non-English-speaking audiences with translation support.
• Experience applying MITRE ATT&CK to support cybersecurity operations.
• Experience integrating AI-enabled workflows with cybersecurity platforms such as SIEM, SOAR, EDR/XDR, threat-intelligence, case-management, or cloud-security platforms.