Cybersecurity Lab Engineer in McLean, Virginia at Merlin International Inc
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Job Description
About Merlin Group
Merlin Group operates at the intersection of cyber innovation, national security, and technology-driven transformation. With a mission to accelerate the adoption of high-impact technologies across the U.S. public sector and regulated commercial markets, Merlin is uniquely structured around three core tenets – Invest, Enable, and Scale – each designed to address a specific stage of the technology lifecycle. Together, our affiliates – Merlin Ventures, CGC, and Merlin Cyber – form a flywheel that builds enduring capability for customers, partners, and the broader cyber ecosystem, operationalizing technological advancement into mission-ready, enterprise-grade solutions.
At Merlin, we believe our strength lies in our people. Team members are encouraged to be creative, collaborative, and nimble, pursuing paths to deliver the cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions that our customers rely on. From next-generation cyber defense to secure cloud and AI, we are united by one purpose – transforming innovation into mission impact.
The Opportunity
Merlin Labs builds the solutions Merlin Cyber takes to market. Working with Merlin Cyber’s technical and sales teams and with our technology partners, we turn partners’ products into working, documented, repeatable solutions for federal customers. We keep a pipeline of those solutions moving, and we are hiring a Cybersecurity Lab Engineer to build them.
You will take products from across our partner ecosystem, integrate them into functioning solutions in our labs, prove they work, and document them well enough that other people can deploy and demonstrate them. Work arrives through a prioritized queue and gets delivered in sprints, so you will deliver on a regular cadence and own the delivered solution. Most of what we build is for federal agencies, so you will design with compliance requirements in mind.
AI tooling is part of how we work. Our engineers use coding agents and LLM APIs every day to get integrations built faster, and we expect the solutions we produce to be AI-enabled themselves.
This role is primarily remote. Candidates in the DC/MD/VA are preferred, since we hold occasional working sessions, Lab Day support, and partner sessions at our headquarters in McLean/Tysons Corner, VA.
Primary Duties & Responsibilities
Solution Development
- Build integrated solutions out of partner products: design the architecture, stand up the environment, connect the products, and get them working together.
- Keep several solutions moving through the pipeline at once, carrying each one through design, build, validation, and release. Expect to deliver multiple solutions a year, not one long project.
- Map the solution to control frameworks, including NIST SP 800-53 and the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model, and produce the supporting evidence that can accelerate authority to operate (ATO) and solution deployment.
- Test each solution against realistic federal architectures and capture the results that back up the claims Merlin makes about it.
- Automate the build. Use scripting, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and vendor APIs so any environment can be rebuilt from source, and any demonstration runs the same way twice.
- Run adversary emulation against what you build, using tools such as Metasploit mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, so the solution is tested against the attacks it claims to stop.
- Build reusable components, patterns, and templates so the next solution takes less time than the last one. Cycle time is a real measure of this job.
- Keep everything in version control, including environment definitions, integration code, and the documentation that goes with them, so a solution can be handed to someone else without a translation step.
AI-Assisted Development
- Use agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, GitLab) and LLM APIs in your daily engineering work: writing and refactoring integration code, generating test data and harnesses, and drafting documentation from working configurations.
- Build reusable AI workflows for the Labs team, including MCP integrations that connect coding agents to our lab tooling and partner APIs, plus agent definitions other engineers can pick up and run.
- Put AI capability inside the solutions themselves: LLM-backed triage and enrichment in SOAR playbooks, retrieval over partner and lab documentation, and natural-language access to lab environments.
- Use AI responsibly in a federal context. Respect data-handling boundaries for partner and customer information, watch for prompt injection and model abuse, and review generated output before it reaches a customer.
Collaboration and Delivery
- Work in a pod plus partner engineers: a Solution Architect, a Technical Product Manager, and you. The architect owns design direction, the TPM owns prioritization, and you own the build.
- Serve as Merlin’s hands-on technical contact for partner engineering teams. Run joint working sessions, resolve API and interoperability problems, and track partner-side defects until they are closed.
- Own your solutions through release. Write the technical content for the Merlin Validated Solution Brief, integration guide, and runbook that ship with each one, and ensure handoff to delivery and support.
- Keep released solutions working. Maintain integrations as partner products change and scope the enhancement requests. Conduct quarterly or bi-annual solution reviews to inform solution roadmap.
- Support Merlin Cyber sellers, solution architects, and Executive Mission Lab Days with environment build-out, dry runs, and live technical help. Feed what you learn in those sessions back into the solution.
Qualifications
- 7+ years in cybersecurity engineering, systems integration, or a similar hands-on role, with a track record of shipping working integrations between security products.
- Productive daily use of AI coding assistants to optimize build tasks and workflows
- Working knowledge of US federal compliance frameworks: NIST SP 800-53, NIST SP 800-171, NIST SP 800-207, FedRAMP, FISMA, and the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model, including the ability to tie a technical capability to specific controls.
- Scripting and automation in Python, PowerShell, Bash, or Go, plus infrastructure-as-code and Git-based workflows (Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI).
- Hands-on work with SIEM and SOAR platforms (Cortex XSIAM, Splunk, or Elastic), EDRs (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne) and experience with API-driven integration between varying security tools.
- Containers and virtualization (Docker, Kubernetes, VMware, Proxmox) and hands-on AWS or Azure, with the ability to stand up a multi-tier environment in our hybrid cloud environment.
- Integration experience with identity platforms (Okta, Entra ID, SAML and OIDC) and with ticketing or workflow systems (ServiceNow, Jira).
- Clear technical writing. In addition to solution documentation, you will write deliverables that will help marketing and sales create customer-ready products.
Preferred Skills & Certifications
- Hands-on Claude Code or a comparable agentic coding tool in a real production workflow; familiarity with MCP; awareness of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
- Federal depth: NIST SP 800-53, DISA STIGs, CISA and DoD Zero Trust Strategy, FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography.
- Custom tooling development for integration or adversary emulation.
- Relevant cybersecurity or cloud security certification.
Success Attributes
- Commitment to personal and professional integrity and respect for others.
- Roll-up-your-sleeves attitude and low-ego approach.
- Commitment to teamwork and professional relationship development.
- Passion for lifelong learning, growth, and development.
- Flexible and nimble; comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.
- Strong communication and functional project management skills.
- Desire to innovate, try new things, and creatively explore novel solutions to business challenges.
- Professional and respectful approach to the diversity of thought, action, identity, and attributes.
Benefits & Perks
We want to empower and inspire employees to be and do their best. Our workdays are dynamic, collegial, and fun. Our office features multiple places to work unconstrained by typical office barriers. Our wellness package provides access to an on-site gym and includes medical, dental, and vision insurance along with options for FSA and EAP. We offer 401(k) with employer match, unlimited PTO, and a culture respectful of the reality that not everything in one’s personal life is guaranteed to happen only after hours.
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.