Principal Space Systems 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.

The Systems and Operations Department (L626) within MITRE’s Systems Engineering Division in the Center for Engineering and Analysis delivers innovative, mission-focused solutions using a multidisciplinary systems engineering approach to address sponsor challenges critical to national security missions. Our core focus areas include mission integration, lifecycle systems engineering, and acquisition systems engineering. Our teams develop, assess, and transition engineering solutions, provide strategic technical vision, and deliver data-informed recommendations that enable sponsor mission success from tactical through enterprise levels.

The Systems and Operations Department is seeking a Principal Space Systems Engineer to serve as a senior technical authority and trusted advisor for complex national security challenges in the space domain. This individual contributor role will shape mission, architecture, acquisition, and investment decisions across individual systems, integrated mission capabilities, and enterprise portfolios. The selected candidate will establish technical direction for high-priority, cross-organizational initiatives, resolve complex integration challenges, and align sponsors and multidisciplinary teams around executable strategies and transition paths.

The successful candidate will combine broad systems thinking, recognized technical depth, and strategic judgment to translate ambiguous enterprise challenges into enduring operational outcomes. The selected candidate will be expected to:

• Serve as a principal technical advisor and primary technical interface for senior sponsors and MITRE leaders. Shape mission priorities, requirements, acquisition approaches, enterprise architectures, investment strategies, and implementation decisions across national security space portfolios

• Establish and lead multidisciplinary efforts that integrate systems of systems engineering, enterprise architecture, mission engineering, operational assessment efforts, and other relevant technical and operational disciplines. Direct mission thread analyses, capability and force design studies, architecture trades, scenario development, and concept evaluation across multiple systems, programs, and mission partners

• Provide technical authority across the end-to-end system lifecycle, including concept development, architecture definition, requirements prioritization, system design, interface definition, integration, verification and validation, deployment, operational employment, and transition. Establish technical baselines, integration strategies, decision criteria, and risk management approaches

• Lead the integration of sensing, command and control, battle management, communications, data, cyber, software, and mission applications into resilient operational capabilities. Identify and resolve dependencies, interface…