Mission Systems Engineer, Senior

Senior Mission 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. MITRE Technology and Engineering (MTE) System Engineering Technical Division is seeking a Senior Mission Engineer to support defense mission engineering, system of systems analysis, experimentation, and decision-support activities for complex operational missions.

The candidate will help decompose missions into mission elements, characterize operational scenarios and vignettes, develop mission threads, define mission measures and metrics, analyze baseline and alternative mission approaches, and translate analytic findings into actionable recommendations for government and program stakeholders.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Frame mission engineering problems and investigative questions:
  Define the mission problem, analysis purpose, decision context, assumptions, constraints, and investigative questions that guide the mission engineering effort.
• Engage stakeholders and subject matter experts:
  Coordinate with operators, government customers, engineers, modelers, intelligence analysts, test teams, and program leadership to validate mission context, assumptions, data sources, and analytic findings.
• Characterize missions, scenarios, and operational environments:
  Develop mission context descriptions, CONOPS, scenarios, vignettes, threat representations, environmental conditions, operational timelines, and relevant mission constraints.
• Develop mission measures and analytic metrics:
  Define and apply Measures of Success, Measures of Effectiveness, Measures of Performance, key mission indicators, and supporting metrics to evaluate mission outcomes and system contributions.
• Create and assess mission architectures:
  Develop operational, functional, logical, and system of systems architecture products that capture mission activities, actors, systems, interfaces, dependencies, information flows, and operational relationships.
• Analyze baseline and alternative mission approaches:
  Compare current-state mission execution against alternative architectures, concepts, capabilities, technologies, or operational approaches to identify gaps, risks, dependencies, and improvement opportunities.
• Conduct mission analysis using modeling and simulation capabilities:
  Develop run matrices, excursions, sensitivity cases, experiment objectives, data collection plans, and analysis methods to evaluate system of systems performance in mission context.
• Evaluate results and assess mission impacts:
  Analyze quantitative and qualitative results, validate findings with stakeholders and SMEs, assess uncertainty and confidence, and determine how systems, capabilities, or changes affect mission success.
• Deliver decision-ready recommendations and reusable mission engineering artifacts:
  Produce briefings, reports, visualizations, models, datasets, assumptions, findings, recommended mission architectures, and curated digital artifacts that support acquisition, prototyping, experimentation, and capability decisions.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree and 5 years of experience in systems engineering, modeling and simulation, software engineering, computer science, or related disciplines.
• Experience supporting defense, aerospace, intelligence, national security, or other mission-critical technical programs.
• Experience with analysis and data tools such as but not limited to Python, MATLAB, R, SQL
• Exposure to architecture/modeling tools: iGrafx, CAMEO, Rhapsody, or equivalent
• Exposure to modeling languages and frameworks:
  SysML, BPMN, UAF/UAFML, or related methods
• Exposure to simulation and mission analysis tools:
  Simulink, AFSIM, ITASE, NGTS, STL/Systems Tool Kit, OneSAF, or similar tools
• Demonstrated ability to analyze complex missions, operational scenarios, system dependencies, system of systems interactions, or capability gaps.
• Experience developing or supporting at least several of the following: mission threads, operational scenarios, vignettes, CONOPS, use cases, functional flows, system architectures, interface concepts, requirements, measures and metrics, run matrices, trade studies, or analysis reports.
• Ability to communicate complex technical and operational findings clearly through briefings, white papers,…