Intermediate Platform Support Engineer

Location: McLean, Virginia; Bedford, Massachusetts; Colorado Springs, Colorado; San Diego, California

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 Mission Computing is a new organization that bridges the gap between Mission and Technology and helps enable MTIRE projects to focus on their work, without worrying about compliance and the underlying platform infrastructure. We apply new technologies that can address the Government's most challenging Systems Engineering problems. This is an opportunity for experienced platform engineers who are highly motivated, innovative, and proactive and interested in owning and maintaining their work to enable the rest of MITRE and sponsors.

Roles & Responsibilities:

MITRE Mission Computing is seeking a Platform Support Engineer to be the front line for the systems that enable critical national security work across MITRE’s Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. You will help users and mission teams get work done on our Kubernetes and cloud platforms: triage issues, author and follow runbooks, escalate when needed, and keep platform teams unblocked.   You will be accountable for clear, timely support of the compute environments that power internal tools and the development and production workloads engineering, research, and mission teams depend on.  A core part of the job is guiding those teams on how to use the platform and its tools correctly and securely.

You will operate in a high-stakes environment defined by novel problems and real constraints, including CMMC compliance, high availability, and cyber resilience.   In this environment you will provide the platforms that enable engineering teams of varying skill maturities to deliver innovative solutions and AI-enabled capabilities to MITRE’s U.S. government sponsors.

If you are energized by helping MITRE platform users get unblocked, prefer being the first to pick up a hard production problem over sitting in a narrow specialty, and want your work to keep mission teams moving, we would like to hear from you. If you are energized by solving hard problems at scale, prefer deep technical ownership over narrow specialization, and want your engineering decisions to have lasting impact, we would like to hear from you.

This an operations role with the primary responsibility being to support our internal customers & interfacing with them directly, triaging issues, solving customer problems, etc.

Basic Qualifications:

• Typically requires a Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 2 years of related experience; or an advanced degree with relevant experience who can immediately contribute at this job step; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
• 2+ years supporting production applications and infrastructure in technical support, systems administration, or operations.
• Hands-on administrative experience of Linux and Windows: logs, services, permissions, and troubleshooting, including account lockouts, MFA, and group-membership / login issues.
• Familiarity with AWS (or similar): instances, networking, IAM, and use of the console and CLI to investigate issues.
• Support-level exposure to containers and Kubernetes: pods, deployments, logs, events, and common failure symptoms.
• Customer-facing ticket and chat skills: reproduce issues, use runbooks, distinguish application vs. platform problems, escalate clearly, and close work with a usable resolution summary.
• Experience with a service desk or work-management tools (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub Issues) and meeting response/resolution expectations.
• Participation in incident response and on-call rotations (e.g., PagerDuty), including following escalation paths and documenting what happened.
• Ability to follow change-management and security procedures in regulated environments (e.g., CMMC, SOC 2).
• Clear written and verbal communication with users, developers, and platform engineers.
• Comfort working in a small team with broad ownership, applying documentation and vendor guidance without step-by-step supervision.
• Experience working in a Kanban workflow: pulling work from a shared board, limiting work in progress, and keeping ticket status current so handoffs stay visible.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S Government issued Security Clearance within one year of hire. 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 per week on-site in McLean, VA, Bedford, MA, San Diego, CA or Colorado Springs, CO.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.
• CompTIA Security+ or CISSP
• Hands-on use of monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, CloudTrail) to find errors and confirm service health.
• Experience building and supporting CI/CD or Git workflows, including diagnosing pipeline failures, rerunning jobs, and verifying deploy status.
• Experience supporting and debugging production issues for both Kubernetes users and the platform’s own tool offerings, including collecting logs, events, and workload status.
• Experience authoring Infrastructure as Code: Terraform that consumes existing modules, and Ansible or similar that use published collections.
• Familiarity with DNS, certificates, load balancers, and remote access (VPN, bastion, SSH, RDP, WinRM), plus basic connectivity checks (ping, curl, traceroute) to separate network problems from application failures.
• Experience remediating platform CVEs (e.g., container, EC2, Lambda) and guiding platform users through remediating CVEs in their own workloads.
• Experience supporting disaster recovery activities:   following DR runbooks, performing backup and recovery, and confirming services are back to a known-good state.
• Prior support work in government, DoD, or other regulated environments.
• Experience writing platform user guidance, SOPs, runbooks, knowledge-base articles, status updates, and post-mortems.
• Background or strong interest in platform, SRE, or cloud operations work.
• Active Secret Clearance

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

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

Salary compensation range and midpoint:

Work Location Type:

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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.

MITRE intends to maintain a website that is fully accessible to all individuals. If you are unable to search or apply for jobs and would like to request a reasonable accommodation for any part of MITRE’s employment process, please email recruitinghelp@mitre.org?subject=Employment%20Process%20Accommodation%20Request" target="_blank">recruitinghelp@mitre.org for general support and collegerecruiting@mitre.org?subject=Employment%20Process%20Accommodation%20Request" target="_blank">collegerecruiting@mitre.org for intern positions. This service is for individuals requiring reasonable accommodation requests. Please note that vendor solicitations will not receive a reply.

Benefits information may be found here.