Mission Systems Engineer, Lead

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 Mission Engineering and System of Systems Engineering department within the Systems Engineering Technical Division is seeking driven, technically exceptional Lead Mission Systems Engineers to support various sponsor across the national security sector such as Department of War, Intelligence Community as well as the public sector to include DHS, HHS, and more. The candidates will support activities such as mission engineering, system of systems analysis, experimentation, and decision-support activities for complex operational missions.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Define mission problems, analysis objectives, decision contexts, assumptions, constraints, and investigative questions. Collaborate with operators, government customers, engineers, analysts, and subject matter experts to validate mission context, data sources, and analytic approaches.

Define operational environments, CONOPS, scenarios, threats, timelines, and mission constraints. Develop operational, functional, logical, and system of systems architectures that capture mission activities, systems, interfaces, dependencies, and information flows.

Establish Measures of Success, Measures of Effectiveness, Measures of Performance, and supporting metrics. Apply modeling, simulation, experimentation, sensitivity analysis, and comparative assessments to evaluate baseline and alternative mission approaches, system of systems performance, risks, and mission impacts.

Analyze quantitative and qualitative results, assess uncertainty and confidence, and validate findings with stakeholders. Deliver actionable recommendations, mission architectures, briefings, reports, visualizations, models, and reusable digital artifacts to inform acquisition, prototyping, experimentation, and capability decisions.

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. Experience supporting defense, aerospace, intelligence, national security, or other mission-critical technical programs.

Knowledge of the DoW R&E Mission Engineering Guide (MEG) v2

Experience with analysis and data tools such as but not limited to Python, MATLAB, R, SQL Experience with architecture/modeling tools: iGrafx, CAMEO, Rhapsody, or equivalent

Experience with modeling languages and frameworks:
SysML 1.7, BPMN, UAF/UAFML, or related methods

Experience with simulation and mission analysis tools:
Simulink, AFSIM, ITASE, NGTS, STL/Systems Tool Kit, OneSAF, or similar tools

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…