Principal Acquisition Transformation Strategist Security Clearance

Position: Principal Acquisition Transformation Strategist with Security Clearance
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. Our nation's ability to defend the homeland, deter aggression, and build a resilient Joint force rests on our capacity to identify, prioritize, and successfully field the optimal set of effective, suitable, and survivable systems.

We must re-envision national security to keep pace with advanced adversaries, leveraging the entire spectrum of the Nation's Innovation Base, while creating and leveraging a growing set of new options and authorities for accelerating Joint and whole-of-nation capabilities. That's where MITRE's Acquisition Studies & Analysis (ASA) Department comes in. We are a diverse group of defense acquisition experts, operations research / system analysts, cybersecurity professionals, and communication systems engineers- all with a united passion to solve problems for a safer world.

We're experienced professionals who advise senior leaders and decision-makers across the national security enterprise. Our evidence-based work garners visibility and provokes thought and action. We're team players who build partnerships across government, industry, academia, and research centers. And above all - we bring objectivity, innovation, courage, and technical excellence to help our sponsors make the right decision.

Roles & Responsibilities MITRE's ASA Department seeks a well-connected and recognized expert on defense acquisition and innovation. The ideal candidate will be a credible authority on defense acquisition, emerging technologies, and national security processes You will belong to a high-performing team that regularly initiates and implements projects in support of sponsors' strategic initiatives, often before a sponsor can fully recognize or articulate that they are needed.

The team may publish, speak at high visibility events, and advise senior government officials.

Responsibilities include:

* Lead transformation in how defense acquisition processes operate within existing statutory and regulatory frameworks. This role contributes acquisition process expertise that complements technical modernization leaders; and it includes streamlining governance, reducing friction across requirements, engineering, acquisition, and budgeting processes, and enabling adoption of modern acquisition approaches to facilitate continuous capability delivery.

* Shape and scale acquisition execution models across sponsor portfolios to better enable incremental capability delivery and continuous value realization.

* Advance acquisition approaches that improve software acquisition execution and enable interoperable, mission-ready capabilities across the Department of War.
* Influence governance structures, decision forums, and oversight approaches to align acquisition control mechanisms with modern engineering and delivery practices.

* Design practical execution architectures that integrate requirements, funding, contracting, engineering, test, and sustainment into synchronized delivery systems.

* Partner with engineering leaders to ensure acquisition strategies reinforce - rather than constrain - Dev Sec Ops , iterative development, and platform-based approaches.

* Reframe performance management from milestone completion toward measurable delivery outcomes.

* Identify systemic barriers within acquisition structures (organizational, financial, cultural, or procedural) and implement pragmatic transformation strategies that improve portfolio throughput.

* Guide sponsors in structuring acquisition pathways - including Software Pathway, hybrid models, and alternative contracting mechanisms - to accelerate transition from prototype to continuous capability delivery.

* Advise senior leaders on portfolio-level prioritization, sequencing, and risk trade-offs to improve capability delivery performance.

* Contribute to development of repeatable frameworks, playbooks, and reference models that can be applied across multiple sponsors to institutionalize modernization gains.

* Serve as a trusted advisor to program teams and senior leaders.

* Proactively help sponsors identify and shape modernization opportunities.

* Build and sustain trusted relationships across sponsors, FFRDC partners, industry, and academic…