Defensive Cybersecurity Engineer/Incident Response

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.

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.

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):

Top Secret

Salary compensation range and midpoint:

$158,800 - $198,500 - $238,200 Annual

Work Location Type:

Onsite

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Commitment to Non-Discrimination

All 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 [email protected] for general support and [email protected] 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.