National Security Analyst - Strategic Analysis & Integration

Are you an experienced analyst who thrives on tackling complex national security challenges where the answers aren't always clear?

If so, we're looking for someone like you to join our team in the National Security Analysis Department (NSAD) at JHU/APL.

NSAD is seeking experienced analysts with strong technical and analytic capabilities who can bring structure, rigor, and creativity to difficult problems at the intersection of adversary behavior, emerging technology, operational concepts, policy, and strategy.

In NSAD, we conduct independent, adversary-informed analysis that helps sharpen national security decision-making by defining what choices are available, what risks they carry, and what trade-offs they create. Our work is methodologically grounded and mission focused. We work across JHU/APL as integrators, helping to understand and articulate how technology fits into a larger operational, strategic, and policy context.

We are increasingly emphasizing data-driven analysis, intelligence-informed assessments, and the use of advanced analytic technologies, including Generative AI, to improve the speed, repeatability, transparency, and insightfulness of our work. We are looking for analysts who can deliver high-quality sponsor work today, while helping to modernize and innovate on the methods, workflows, and tools our analysts will need tomorrow.

The strongest candidates will combine analytic depth with breadth of perspective. We do not expect every analyst to be an expert in every method; we expect experienced analysts to understand the strengths and limitations of different approaches. We expect they are intellectually curious, comfortable with ambiguity, proactive in identifying and solving problems, and willing to learn new methods and technologies. Strong candidates will also be engaged and collaborative analysts who take ownership, identify what needs to be done, and work constructively across teams and disciplines to move complex efforts forward.

We value analysts who can challenge ideas and assumptions while engaging colleagues with respect, intellectual humility, and a shared commitment to producing the best analysis.

• Lead and contribute to rigorous, data-driven national security analyses, looking across adversary capabilities and behavior, emerging technologies, operational concepts, policy implications, force structure, readiness, institutional capacity, and mission risk.
• Serve as an analytic integrator across technical, operational, intelligence, policy, and strategic perspectives, translating complex evidence into clear findings for sponsors and senior decision makers.
• Develop innovative analytic approaches to complex, ambiguous problems by framing key questions, identifying assumptions, defining measures of effectiveness, determining data requirements, evaluating uncertainty, and communicating defensible findings.
• Incorporate advanced analytic tools and methods into your work, including quantitative analysis, qualitative research, modeling and simulation, social science methodologies, and wargaming and tabletop exercises.
• Help build reusable analytic frameworks, datasets, baselines, and workflows that allow our analysts to assess evolving adversary capabilities, blue force options, technology impacts, and mission risks over time.
• Be an engaged member of multidisciplinary teams!
  -to include technical experts and specialists- identify what needs to be done, take ownership, seek out expertise and perspectives different from your own, and help colleagues solve problems and move work forward.
• Partner with JHU/APL program managers to shape work and engage directly with government sponsors and senior decision makers to understand their challenges, shape analytic questions, and present compelling results.
• Translate analytic results into clear insights for sponsor decisions and effectively communicate complex findings through briefings, reports, visualizations, and other products tailored to senior-leader audiences.
• Mentor junior analysts by helping them structure problems, apply sound methodology, evaluate evidence, communicate clearly, and develop as independent analytic contributors.

You meet our minimum qualifications for the job if you...

• Have a Master's degree or higher in operations research, statistics, applied mathematics, the physical or social sciences, engineering, economics, or another analytically…