Strategic Data Scientist — National Security Analytics

Mitre Corporation; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 155,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement plan

Professional development

Job summary

MITRE’s Systems Engineering Analytics department seeks a Data Scientist to apply statistics, ML/AI, and software development to solve mission-critical problems affecting national security and health. You will prepare and analyze complex data, evaluate models, and deliver analytic capabilities for government sponsors.

You will collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to transition AI methods into operational capabilities, mentoring teammates and communicating findings clearly to

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in CS/DS/Statistics/Applied Math/OR/IS or related field with 8+ years of relevant experience, or a master’s degree with 6+ years, or a PhD with 3+ years.
• Hands-on experience applying statistical analysis and ML techniques to real-world problems, including model development, validation, and evaluation.
• Programming proficiency in Python or R, with experience using SQL to access, prepare, and analyze data.
• Experience working with complex datasets and developing reproducible data preparation, analysis, and modeling workflows.
• Must have an active Secret U.S. Government issued Security Clearance and eligibility for Top Secret/SCI clearance.

Responsibilities

• Translate complex mission needs into analytical questions and implementable technical approaches.
• Develop and evaluate statistical, ML, and deep learning models for prediction, classification, forecasting, anomaly detection, NLP, CV, graph analytics, or multimodal analysis.
• Prepare and curate large, heterogeneous data sets with feature engineering and addressing data quality challenges.
• Design rigorous model validation, including cross-validation, temporal and out-of-distribution testing.
• Integrate foundation models (LLMs and multimodal) with enterprise data and tools, using prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning.
• Develop AI evaluation datasets and benchmarks emphasizing accuracy, grounding, robustness, and operational suitability, with responsible AI practices.
• Design analytics-ready data architectures (warehouses, lakes, lakehouse, relational/NoSQL/graph/vector databases) with governance and metadata.
• Build scalable batch and streaming pipelines across cloud/on-premise/hybrid environments.
• Develop reproducible analytic software in Python/SQL with experiment tracking, model registries, and versioning.
• Transition analytic prototypes into operational capabilities with engineering teams, including deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and rollback.
• Lead technical tasks, mentor colleagues, and communicate complex results to decision-makers.

Skills

Statistical analysis

Machine learning

Python

SQL

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / Data Science / Statistics / Applied Mathematics / OR/Information Systems (or related)

Master’s degree in a related field

PhD in a related field

Tools

Python

R

SQL

Job description

MITRE’s Systems Engineering Analytics department seeks a Data Scientist to apply statistics, ML/AI, and software development to solve mission-critical problems affecting national security and health. You will prepare and analyze complex data, evaluate models, and deliver analytic capabilities for government sponsors.

You will collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to transition AI methods into operational capabilities, mentoring teammates and communicating findings clearly to