Lead Software Engineer

Lead 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.

MITRE is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to design, build, secure, and operate mission-focused software systems and data platforms. The role emphasizes Python development, AWS cloud-native and distributed architectures, DevSecOps automation, and data engineering/ETL to support analytical and operational use cases. The candidate will deliver features and technical solutions, contribute to system architecture and engineering process improvements, and support both sustained program delivery and fast-turn mission needs.

The candidate should be prepared to work across multiple technology areas (cloud infrastructure, software engineering, and data engineering) and to support a mix of standard program work and urgent, high-impact enablement tasks as organizational priorities evolve. Responsibilities may include some or all of:

• Deliver modern software capabilities, improving architecture, platforms, and developer workflows with strong engineering practices (secure coding, reviews, testing, maintainable design).
• Partner with UX, Architecture, Data, Security, and Operations to define technical strategy and influence roadmaps with a customer-centric mindset.
• Champion architectural excellence (cloud-native, event-driven, microservices where appropriate) across AWS/Azure, balancing long-term vision with pragmatic execution.
• Design and integrate backend services and RESTful APIs, ensuring reliable data flows for mission workflows and downstream consumers.
• Build and operate data pipelines (ETL/ELT) for ingestion, transformation, validation, and publishing to analytics and operational APIs (including Airflow orchestration as needed).
• Develop and optimize data models, SQL, and database access patterns (PostgreSQL/MongoDB), including migrations and data quality strategies.
• Implement containerized deployments with Docker/Kubernetes, including configuration, deployment patterns, and troubleshooting.
• Engineer DevSecOps/CI/CD pipelines with security and quality gates and repeatable release processes.
• Provision and manage Linux environments using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) for reproducible dev/test/prod deployments.
• Communicate clearly via high-quality design docs/RFCs and runbooks; lead architecture reviews, incident response, post-incident learning, and compliance/observability integration (e.g., Splunk); mentor engineers and raise standards through reviews and design sessions.

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. The individual should be able to immediately contribute to this job step.
• The applicant will need to be able access and work in classified environments as needed.
• Entrepreneurial and innovative spirit and the curiosity to explore and push the boundaries of software development and software solutions.
• Strong Python development experience with modern software engineering practices.
• Experience building distributed systems in AWS or multi-cloud environments.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience implementing DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and data pipelines
• Familiarity with databases such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB
• Experience with Linux environments and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)
• Experience with modern web technologies (React, JavaScript, HTML/CSS)
• Ability to work in Agile development environments with strong documentation practices
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S Government issued Security Clearance. Per the U.S. Government's eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
• This position requires a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in a technical discipline (including but not limited to Software Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, etc.)
• Active Secret or Top-Secret clearance preferred; the applicant should be willing and able to obtain and maintain a Top Secret clearance as mission needs evolve
• Experience delivering software in compliance-aligned environments and hardening systems to standards such as NIST 800-171 and/or NIST 800-53, including producing audit-ready evidence
• Experience building and operating AWS data platforms (e.g., Glue, EMR) and implementing automated data quality validation and monitoring
• Experience with workflow orchestration and streaming/event platforms such as Airflow and/or Kafka
• Experience with cloud automation and Infrastructure as Code beyond baseline use (e.g., reusable Terraform modules, AWS CDK patterns, environment promotion strategies)
• Experience with observability platforms such as Splunk, including onboarding data sources, parsing, dashboards, and alerting to support security/compliance and operational readiness
• Experience supporting mission analysis, test and evaluation, operational systems, and/or integration with external mission partners or vendor solutions
• Experience with simulation environments such as AFSIM
• Experience administering or operating production systems (applications, databases, and/or networks), including incident response practices and reliability improvements
• Experience using agentic software development tools and technologies, including Codex / ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, or other similar models and agent-based tools

Salary compensation range and midpoint: $156,800 - $196,000 - $235,200 Annual

Work Location Type: Onsite

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.