Principal Telecommunications Network Architect

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MITRE's Advanced Wireless & SATCOM Department, within the Infrastructure, Networking, and Communications Division, provides independent communications engineering, network architecture, and technical analysis in support of critical national missions. We seek a senior technical leader with deep, practical telecommunications backbone and carrier-core experience to help federal cybersecurity and critical-infrastructure partners understand how diverse telecom networks are built, interconnected, operated, monitored, and defended. This position emphasizes mission-driven engineering analysis, technical leadership, and trusted-advisor support across legacy and modern telecommunications systems.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• Serve as a senior technical advisor on telecommunications carrier core, backbone, transport, and service architectures in support of cybersecurity, infrastructure defense, and mission assurance activities.

• Characterize end-to-end fixed & mobile telecom architectures, including signaling, control & user planes, network functions, interconnects, routing, management systems, and network visibility points.

• Partner with cyber analysts and threat hunting teams to turn mission questions into technically sound hypotheses, telecom-specific analysis methods, applicable telemetry sources, and practical findings, highlighting gaps and limitations in visibility.

• Assess telecommunications network security, service dependencies, fault & failure modes, resilience, and attack surfaces and recommend engineering mitigations and testable approaches grounded in actual carrier network behavior.

• Shape and support collaborative government-industry technical pilots and COOP activities, including PACE communications planning and alternative transport & service approaches.

• Develop and independently review system and reference architectures, interface & dataflow diagrams, technical trade studies, analysis reports, integration plans, and briefings that prioritize actions and make informed decisions.

• Collaborate directly with federal mission stakeholders, telecom operators, equipment vendors, and multidisciplinary engineering teams to reconcile requirements, validate technical assumptions, and communicate recommendations clearly.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline with 10 years of related experience; or Master’s with 7 years; or PhD with 5 years; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.

• Substantial direct, hands-on experience engineering, architecting, integrating, troubleshooting, or technically assessing production-scale carrier telecommunications networks and their operational behavior.

• Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of carrier-grade telecommunications infrastructure beyond 5G radio access, including core network functions, IP transport & routing, signaling & interconnection, and the relationship between network elements, services, and operational telemetry.

• Ability to analyze complex communications architectures and identify network dependencies, technical risks, network behavior, and security & monitoring opportunities across heterogeneous legacy and modern systems.

• Experience developing technically sound architecture assessments, problem analyses, trade studies, or engineering recommendations that inform operational or programmatic decisions.

• Demonstrated senior technical leadership and ability to work effectively across engineering teams, government stakeholders, and industry partners.

• Ability to obtain and maintain the personnel suitability and access determinations required for assigned federal sponsor work.

• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a DHS Fitness 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:

• Direct engineering experience with multiple generations of commercial mobile-core or fixed telecom networks, such as LTE & 5G, EPC & 5GC, IMS, Diameter, and associated roaming & interconnect architectures.

• Experience with large-scale IP, MPLS, BGP, optical transport, DCI, and carrier operations & support systems and ability to explain how these components interact.

• Hands-on experience with telecommunications threat hunting, network security analysis, incident investigation, protocol & packet inspection, or mapping threats to carrier network elements and exploitable visibility & detection points.

• Experience with communications resiliency and COOP analysis, including critical infrastructure dependencies, failure propagation, alternate communications pathways, and PACE planning.

• Experience supporting government-industry technical pilots, multistakeholder reference architectures, and evaluations of various telecom technologies.

• Prior work with telecommunications carriers, major network equipment suppliers, critical infrastructure operators, or federal mission sponsors in a senior technical advisor or chief architect role.

• Existing sponsor suitability determination or prior experience onboarding to federal civilian mission environments, with the ability to engage effectively in time-sensitive sponsor work.

This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s):

None

This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s):

Fitness - DHS

Salary compensation range and midpoint:

$162,400 - $203,000 - $243,600 Annual

Work Location Type:

Onsite

Commitment to Non-Discrimination

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.

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