Lead AI Security Engineer

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 Trustworthy & Secure AI (TSAI) Department consists of a diverse team united by a passion and a sense of urgency to harness trustworthy and assured artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve problems in the public interest. The TSAI Department supports our sponsors' missions by delivering capabilities for securing and increasing trust in AI-enabled systems, including data driven AI risk awareness and mitigation, AI red teaming, and trusted tools and techniques for applying AI in high consequence environments. The TSAI Department works across government, industry, and academia to provide, assess, and shape trustworthy and secure AI systems to address complex mission needs for our sponsors. Our work provides opportunities to address real-world challenges in the rapidly developing field of AI assurance, and to research and prototype new methods to address mission needs. We are looking for highly motivated, adaptive, and self-directed candidates to perform research, development, engineering, evaluation, and integration of secure AI systems.

Roles & Responsibilities:

The position involves assessing threats to AI systems, research and development of defenses and mitigations against adversarial AI tactics and techniques, and integrating AI solutions into government systems. Specific responsibilities will include:

• Provide technical leadership on cross-functional teams performing AI adversarial threat analysis to identify and characterize vulnerabilities in real-world national security systems
• Work across military and intelligence community sponsors to understand shared needs and technologies
• Utilize and enhance MITRE ATLAS framework for assessing threats to AI-enabled systems
• Assess and design AI systems for threat detection, monitoring, and reporting
• Provide thought leadership supporting the innovation of new AI capabilities applied to cyber operational challenges
• Convey complex ideas to non-technical audiences through briefings and/or white papers
• Lead, mentor, and collaborate with technical staff

Basic Qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of experience in artificial intelligence with a Bachelor's degree in a relevant field; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years’ experience; or equivalent combination of AI-related education and work experience.
• Advanced understanding of foundational AI/ML theory, with demonstrated ability to reason about AI system behavior, vulnerabilities, and evaluation
• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following technical areas: agentic AI, deep reinforcement learning, computer vision, generative AI
• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following AI security topics: AI red teaming, AI T&E, adversarial AI, AI-enhanced cybersecurity, AI strategy and governance
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to articulate challenging technical concepts to both lay and expert audiences
• Proven ability to lead interdisciplinary teams and engage senior mission stakeholders across technical and operational domains
• Ability and willingness to obtain and maintain a DOD TS/SCI security clearance with CI poly within 12 months from the date of hire
• 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 a week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in computer science, engineering, or related disciplines
• Track record of successful deployment of AI/ML systems or components that have been used by customers or stakeholders outside of a lab/experimental setting
• Experience leading large teams of 10 or more to solve complex technical challenges
• Practical experience with AI-enabled offensive security, adversarial AI experimentation, AI-accelerated cyber operations, or distributed AI-enabled defensive security
• Experience generating or analyzing intelligence reporting data
• Familiarity with MITRE ATLAS threat matrix
• Active IC or DOD TS/SCI security clearance with CI Poly
• Active DHS S&T fitness or CISA suitability

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/SCI/Polygraph

Salary compensation range and midpoint:

$174,000 - $217,500 - $261,000 Annual

Work Location Type:

Onsite

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.

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