At MITRE, your passion fuels work that impacts our nation and improves lives. This is where your skills strengthen national security, cybersecurity, health, transportation, and citizen services. We're a nonprofit engineering, applied research, and advanced technology organization working in the public interest. With objectivity and integrity at our core, we lead federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies - collaborating with industry and academia to deliver integrated, high-impact solutions that advance our nation's health, security, and prosperity. Our people tackle the toughest technical challenges, supported by competitive benefits, meaningful career development, and a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Choose MITRE for a career with purpose - and help shape the future.
MITRE's Advanced Wireless & SATCOM Department, within the Infrastructure, Networking, and Communications Division, provides independent communications engineering, network architecture, and technical analysis in support of critical national missions. We seek a senior technical leader with deep, practical telecommunications backbone and carrier-core experience to help federal cybersecurity and critical-infrastructure partners understand how diverse telecom networks are built, interconnected, operated, monitored, and defended. This position emphasizes mission-driven engineering analysis, technical leadership, and trusted-advisor support across legacy and modern telecommunications systems.
Roles & Responsibilities:- Serve as a senior technical advisor on telecommunications carrier core, backbone, transport, and service architectures in support of cybersecurity, infrastructure defense, and mission assurance activities.
- Characterize end-to-end fixed & mobile telecom architectures, including signaling, control & user planes, network functions, interconnects, routing, management systems, and network visibility points.
- Partner with cyber analysts and threat hunting teams to turn mission questions into technically sound hypotheses, telecom-specific analysis methods, applicable telemetry sources, and practical findings, highlighting gaps and limitations in visibility.
- Assess telecommunications network security, service dependencies, fault & failure modes, resilience, and attack surfaces and recommend engineering mitigations and testable approaches grounded in actual carrier network behavior.
- Shape and support collaborative government-industry technical pilots and COOP activities, including PACE communications planning and alternative transport & service approaches.
- Develop and independently review system and reference architectures, interface & dataflow diagrams, technical trade studies, analysis reports, integration plans, and briefings that prioritize actions and make informed decisions.
- Collaborate directly with federal mission stakeholders, telecom operators, equipment vendors, and multidisciplinary engineering teams to reconcile requirements, validate technical assumptions, and communicate recommendations clearly.
Basic Qualifications:- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline with 10 years of related experience; or Master's with 7 years; or PhD with 5 years; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
- Substantial direct, hands-on experience engineering, architecting, integrating, troubleshooting, or technically assessing production-scale carrier telecommunications networks and their operational behavior.
- Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of carrier-grade telecommunications infrastructure beyond 5G radio access, including core network functions, IP transport & routing, signaling & interconnection, and the relationship between network elements, services, and operational telemetry.
- Ability to analyze complex communications architectures and identify network dependencies, technical risks, network behavior, and security & monitoring opportunities across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems.
- Experience developing technically sound architecture assessments, problem analyses, trade studies, or engineering recommendations that inform operational or programmatic decisions.
- Demonstrated senior technical leadership and ability to work effectively across engineering teams, government stakeholders, and industry partners.
- Ability to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability and access determinations required for assigned federal sponsor work.
- Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a DHS Fitness clearance.
- This position requires a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.
Preferred Qualifications:- Direct engineering experience with multiple generations of commercial mobile-core or fixed telecom networks, such as LTE & 5G, EPC & 5 IMS, Diameter, and associated roaming & interconnect architectures.
- Experience with large-scale IP, MPLS, BGP, optical transport, DCI, and carrier operations & support systems and ability to explain how these components interact.
- Hands-on experience with telecommunications threat hunting, network security analysis, incident investigation, protocol & packet inspection, or mapping threats to carrier network elements and exploitable visibility & detection points.
- Experience with communications resiliency and COOP analysis, including critical infrastructure dependencies, failure propagation, alternate communications pathways, and PACE planning.
- Experience supporting government-industry technical pilots, multistakeholder reference architectures, and evaluations of various telecom technologies.
- Prior work with telecommunications carriers, major network equipment suppliers, critical infrastructure operators, or federal mission sponsors in a senior technical advisor or chief architect role.
- Existing sponsor suitability determination or prior experience onboarding to federal civilian mission environments, with the ability to engage effectively in time-sensitive sponsor work.
This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s):None
This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s):Fitness - DHS
Salary compensation range and midpoint:$162,400 - $203,000 - $243,600 Annual
Work Location Type:Onsite
Commitment to Non-DiscriminationAll qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.
MITRE intends to maintain a website that is fully accessible to all individuals. If you are unable to search or apply for jobs and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of MITRE's employment process, please email for general support and for intern positions. This service is for individuals requiring reasonable accommodation requests. Please note that vendor solicitations will not receive a reply.
Benefits information may be found here.
Copyright 1997-2026, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved. MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.
