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Employment Opportunities

The National Security Institute is a fast-growing center at Virginia Tech, and currently supports over 100 faculty, staff, and graduate students. Virginia Tech, which ranked in the top 30 of Forbes' America’s Best Employers for New Grads list and the third-highest ranked educational employer on the list, is committed to developing well-rounded employees who are active members of the university community as well as the community at-large. From comprehensive insurance plans to tuition assistance, Virginia Tech offers employees a variety of benefits and perks.

We are always looking for additional talent to support our programs as faculty, researchers, program managers, and administrative professionals. Opportunities exist both at the main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, and at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, Virginia. We primarily seek US citizens and permanent residents to support our defense-funded research projects.

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      Senior Research Associate, Data Science , redirect

      This is a research and development position that may be based in Blacksburg or Arlington, Virginia and is part of the Hume Center’s Intelligent Systems Lab (ISL). Depending on the qualifications of the successful candidates, offer in rank may be at the research associate or senior research associate level. Specific responsibilities include (1) Support research conducted in ISL in projects focused on design of experiments, time series analyses, anomaly detection, natural language processing, large scale data infrastructure, and test and evaluation (2) Contribute to technical documents/presentations and peer-reviewed academic papers (3) Provide mentorship to students working on programs.

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      Research Engineer, SDD , redirect

      Motivated Research Engineer applicants are sought to begin their careers in a junior research position, supporting rapid growth in our Spectrum Dominance Division (SDD), which leads ideation and research execution for: • Secure digital communication • Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) • Digital Signal Processing • Radio Frequency Machine Learning (RFML) • Electromagnetic materials • 5G / 6G communications • Electronic Warfare / Radar • Quantum algorithm development. Duties include working as part of team-based research efforts, supporting the development of research proposals, developing skills to assist in the presentation of research results to sponsors and academic communities, support documentation for intellectual properties developed on research efforts, and supporting external engagement with customers during program execution.

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      Research Faculty Open Rank SDD , redirect

      This pooled position may be based in Blacksburg or Arlington, Virginia and is part of the Hume Center’s Spectrum Dominance Division (SDD). The position is focused on individuals with expertise in any of three key technology areas to support a growing portfolio of programs: (1) Digital communications, signal processing, software-defined radio, and machine learning techniques applied to temporal data, such as RF I/Q streams, audio, or video. (2) Quantum information science and engineering, with emphasis on quantum algorithm development using current and/or near-term quantum computers (3) Computational electromagnetics, with emphasis on electromagnetic materials, interactions between EM behaviors/propagation, and manufacturing / testing of EM materials Responsibilities include: (1) support the execution of university sponsored programs by conducting research and development; (2) author technical documents and publish peer-reviewed academic papers; (3) support the development of new funded research programs by participating in proposal teams and supporting the business development activities of the Hume Center; and (4) provide mentorship to students and junior researchers working on programs.

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      Software Systems Engineer , redirect

      The Intelligent Systems Division (ISD) of the Virginia Tech National Security Institute (VTNSI) at Virginia Tech is looking for a driven and hard-working engineer with interest and experience in modeling and simulation of systems. Responsibilities include: ● Refinement and management of the Mission Aware meta-model to align with future cyber resilience research, such as SysML v2, standardization and Digital Engineering (DE) trends ● Definition and refinement of case study model-based systems engineering (MBSE) system models ● Generation of tooling in support of documentation and training for cybersecurity, MBSE and DE processes and methodologies ● Support for research reports, presentations, and conferences

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      Transportation Cybersecurity Researcher , redirect

      The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) and the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology at Virginia Tech (Hume Center), and the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Virginia (CCI SWVA) are seeking a Cybersecurity Research Engineer through a joint appointment to support the development of a Transportation Cybersecurity Research program. The position is being offered at the Senior Research Associate rank or Research Scientist depending on experience. Responsibilities include: • Develop and oversee new sponsored research and funding opportunities through collaborative proposal development and sponsor relationship development • Collaborate with sponsors on automotive and infrastructure security during design, development, and testing • Mentor and potentially manage junior researchers to expand cyber security capabilities • Perform security assessments, code audits and design reviews for connected vehicles, automated vehicles, electric vehicles, and connected infrastructure systems • Exercise, evaluate, and expand upon existing transportation security protocol systems and standards • Translate cybersecurity best practices from other domains to automotive contexts • Research and develop technical solutions to mitigate security risks • Conduct research to identify and exercise new attack vectors against modern transportation systems • Develop threat models for transportation systems using industry best practices • Generate security requirements for sponsor engineers and product developers