Principal Targeting Analyst-TS Required

Principal Targeting Analyst

Target development for cyber operations, red-team engagements, and applied R&D

Position:
Principal Targeting Analyst

Job Type: Full-time

Location:

Ft. Meade, MD (Hybrid)

Clearance Requirements: US Citizen &TS/SCI

Experience:

8+ years

SIXGEN is seeking a Principal Targeting Analyst to build and lead an organic targeting and collection capability that strengthens our offensive cyber, red-team, and adversary-emulation missions. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an analyst-engineer hybrid who enjoys solving hard collection problems, developing targets from a cold start, and turning operational experience into automated, mission-ready capability.

As a Principal Targeting Analyst, you ll pair deep OSINT and managed-attribution tradecraft with professional foreign-language proficiency, applied AI engineering, and real software-development ability. You ll partner with operators, engineers, and program teams to deliver timely targeting and access intelligence, mature SIXGEN s collection methodologies and tooling, and mentor analysts as the capability grows.

Whether you re developing a target for a critical customer mission, automating collection at scale, or shaping the technical direction of a new capability, your operational credibility and technical judgment will help drive mission success across the organization.

• Conduct end-to-end target development against threat actors, and adversary infrastructure — from initial requirement through finished, decision-ready intelligence.
• Direct collection across the surface, deep, and dark web, closed forums, encrypted messaging platforms, and regional ecosystems beyond the coverage of commercial data sources.
• Perform authorized threat-actor engagement and elicitation; track initial-access brokers, exploit sellers, and access markets relevant to mission objectives.
• Conduct lawful analysis of credential, breach, and infostealer-log datasets, plus cryptocurrency tracing and target deanonymization, to identify access vectors and attribute infrastructure and operators.
• Deliver timely targeting updates and access intelligence in support of red-team and operational engagements; author finished intelligence and brief senior stakeholders and customers.

• Establish and govern durable, non-attributable personas spanning multiple regions — programmatic creation, automated aging and backstopping, sustainment, and OPSEC-safe access control.
• Design and maintain managed-attribution infrastructure: VPS estates, egress and redirector architectures, fingerprint control, and compartmented access paths.
• Manage OPSEC-compliant procurement and resourcing practices that support persona creation, infrastructure acquisition, and operational sustainment in a controlled, auditable manner.
• Author and enforce the governing SOPs and defensive operating standards that keep the capability secure and compliant.

• Design and deploy agentic AI workflows and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that automate discovery, monitoring, collection, and enrichment across the capability.
• Apply LLMs and multimodal models to real-time translation, entity extraction, data labeling, and semantic summarization of text, image, and video at scale — with evaluation harnesses that keep automated output accurate and auditable.
• Build production-grade collection tooling, scrapers, and API integrations in Python, JavaScript/Type Script, and Bash; architect ingestion pipelines that move raw collection into structured, queryable platforms.
• Stand up cloud and serverless infrastructure (AWS or equivalent) and analyst-facing applications that reduce triage time and operational friction.
• Evaluate and unify commercial data sources for baseline collection while prototyping core tooling in-house, focusing engineering effort on hardening validated, high-value capabilities.

• Apply professional foreign-language proficiency to collect, exploit, and contextualize target-language…