Principal Software 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.

Department Summary:

MITRE is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating a safer world by developing innovative solutions to real-world problems. Our team of passionate professionals is driven by a shared mission to make the world a safer place.  The Cloud and Distributed Software Systems Department focuses on delivering robust, resilient, scalable solutions that account for all qualities cloud environments can offer and leverage distributed architectures to deliver missions that are enduring and resistant to technical compromise.

Roles & Responsibilities :  We're seeking an experienced and properly credentialed Principal Software Engineer to join our team, who not only excels in software development but also possesses business development, innovation, and leadership skills. In this position, you will play a critical role in driving technical innovation, leading cross-functional teams, and collaborating with stakeholders to identify and pursue new opportunities for impact.

The successful candidate will:

Translate the sponsor’s data mesh vision into an executable technical roadmap, working prototypes, and production-ready capabilities across three integrated layers: data products, security, and analytics.

Contribute to the design, development, integration, and testing of an enterprise data architecture that enables interoperability and information sharing among authorized partners while conforming to sponsor security requirements, standards, and policies.

Lead implementation of resilient cloud and distributed software capabilities, addressing scalability, availability, performance, operational support, and recovery.

Establish repeatable deployment patterns, automated infrastructure provisioning, integration pipelines, and implementation guidance that accelerate adoption across participating organizations.

Integrate security throughout the development lifecycle, including identity and access management, data protection, vulnerability management, monitoring, and evidence supporting security assessment and authorization.

Enable analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities through secure access to governed data products and integration with cloud-based tools and services.

Incorporate data ownership, discoverability, metadata, provenance, quality, and access policies into platform implementation to support responsible data use and modern data governance.

Lead cross-functional engineering teams; mentor technical staff; and coordinate with sponsor stakeholders, mission partners, security authorities, and technology providers to resolve implementation barriers.

Communicate technical options, delivery progress, risks, and investment priorities to technical and executive audiences.

Identify opportunities for mission impact, develop technical approaches and proposals, and contribute to business development and department innovation.

Basic Qualifications:

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