Cyber Capability Engineer

Company Overview

Metrea delivers effects-as-a-service to national security partners across five domains and more than a dozen mission areas. These include airborne ISR, electronic warfare, secure communications, aerial refueling, special air missions, aerial firefighting, and advanced simulation. We own the whole stack: designing, building, and operating turnkey capabilities that give our partners decisive, asymmetric advantage against rapidly evolving threats.

Our operating model is built around three interlocking pillars. The Support Groups provide a global shared-service – spanning people, finance, platform, operations, legal, and engagement. This frees up our Core Groups, who develop and own mission capabilities end-to-end, to focus entirely on delivery. The Market Groups apply a regional lens, ensuring that our agile and adaptable capabilities remain aligned to the wicked problems that matter most to our partners across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

At the heart of our model is a simple but powerful idea: be a true partner with skin in the game. Our partners need effects, not just equipment. By owning the full stack – from the lab to the field – we are able to drive a continuous cycle of innovation that keeps our partners ahead. It's a fast-moving, intellectually demanding environment where talented people are given real responsibility, work on problems that matter, and contribute to an enterprise that is growing quickly and deliberately.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, with facilities across the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as Continental Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Group Overview

Electromagnetic and Cyber Group (EM&C) is responsible for developing flexible and survivable advanced electronic warfare and secure communications equipment while providing the industry’s leading signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber experts.  Metrea specializes in signal classification, direction finding, advanced geolocation techniques, and waveform development including waveforms for MANET and LPI/LPD applications. Metrea also develops special purpose radios for government customers and licenses DF and geolocation solutions to multiple OEMs.

Position Summary

We are looking for a hands-on cyber practitioner who can build capabilities, operate them alongside customers, and turn operational experience into better tools. This role develops and supports deployable cyber tools, wireless reconnaissanc systems, and the software and infrastructure that connect them. The work spans device and network characterization, authorized access generation, distributed sensors, and operator command-and-control interfaces. The right person understands both how these systems work and how they are used: what an operator needs to discover, what the available data actually tells them, and what technical action is appropriate next. This is not a traditional data engineering or research-only position. It combines cyber operations, software development, systems integration, and expeditionary mission support. The engineer should be equally comfortable developing a capability in the lab, troubleshooting it in the field, and returning with evidence of what needs to change. Data engineering and AI are tools for improving operational outcomes—not the purpose of the role.

What You'll Do

• Develop operational cyber capabilities. Build, integrate, and improve modular tools supporting wireless survey, reconnaissance, device and network enumeration, technical characterization, and operator-directed access workflows. Turn useful scripts and prototypes into capabilities that others can reliably employ.

• Prepare, deploy, and operate systems. Configure and support Linux-based sensors, edge compute, communications links, and remote operator interfaces. Validate that capabilities work in disconnected, bandwidth-constrained, and resource-limited environments—not only on a development network.

• Work alongside operators. Support mission preparation, customer engagements, exercises, trials, and authorized operational activity. Understand the customer’s problem, help employ the system appropriately, troubleshoot technical issues, and clearly communicate capability limitations.

• Own the mission-data workflow. Develop the ingestion, normalization, storage, retrieval, and correlation of wireless observations, device telemetry, and network state. Ensure information remains useful to operators during a mission and available for analysis afterward.

• Apply analytics and AI where they improve the mission. Build and evaluate capabilities that help operators characterize devices, correlate observations, recognize changes, and reduce manual analysis. Assess accuracy, confidence, latency, and edge-compute requirements before treating a model as an operational capability.

• Integrate and harden the wider system. Connect sensors, software modules, APIs, databases, and command-and-control components. Diagnose failures across software, operating systems, networking, and hardware interfaces, and work with the engineering team to resolve underlying causes.

• Turn field learning into repeatable capability. Capture operational observations, technical failures, and emerging customer problems. Convert them into tested improvements, reusable tooling, deployment procedures, and clear documentation rather than one-off fixes that depend on their original developer.

What You Bring

• At least five years of relevant experience across cyber operations, offensive security, security tooling, or operational systems engineering; alternatively, a relevant bachelor’s degree with at least two years of directly applicable experience. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to work independently.

• Hands-on experience in penetration testing, red teaming, vulnerability research, cyber mission support, or a comparable technical operational role. Able to move beyond running tools to understanding and adapting their behavior.

• Strong practical development skills in Python or Rust, with experience using Bash and Linux-native tooling. Comfortable reading, modifying, debugging, and integrating existing code.

• Strong Linux and networking fundamentals, including packet analysis, IP networking, wireless networking, remote access, service configuration, and troubleshooting distributed systems.

• Experience working with structured data, databases, and APIs, alongside version control and repeatable testing and deployment practices. Able to connect technical outputs to an operator’s actual question.

Preferred Experience

• A cyber operator who builds tools, or a security engineer who has worked close enough to operations to understand their constraints. Experience supporting special operations, deployed technical teams, wireless reconnaissance, or expeditionary communications is particularly relevant, but equivalent civilian experience is welcome.

• Experience with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth security, cellular technologies, software-defined radio, embedded Linux, or resource-constrained computing is valuable. Applied ML and local inference experience are useful where supported by practical implementation.

• The right person is curious, entrepreneurial, systematic, and discerning. They take initiative, exercise sound technical judgment, and know when a field workaround needs to become an engineered solution.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical plan options

• HSA/FSA accounts

• Dental and vision coverage

• 6% employer 401(k) match

• Fully paid parental leave for all new parents

• Generous PTO

• Life and disability insurance

• Long-term and Short-term disability coverage

• AD&D Coverage

• Pet Insurance

• Employee Assistance Program

• Subsided gym membership / plans through Wellhub

Work Authorization / Security Clearance

• Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

• Must be a U.S. citizen.

• Role may require adherence to export control regulations