Career Fields
About DIA Careers
A career with DIA will have you working with men and women committed to supporting the nation's warfighter.
Careers in-demand at DIA
In the analysis career field, you will serve at the heart of our global mission. You will provide cutting-edge insight and expertise from locations around the world on foreign military capabilities and defense issues in support of our nation's warfighters, policymakers and defense planners. Through written products, in-person briefings or multimedia presentations, your work will inform tactical decisions for policy, defense strategy, weapons development and acquisition and military planning.
Our analysts come from diverse backgrounds and can look forward to a career with rewarding training, advanced education opportunities and challenging assignments with DIA and the intelligence community.
In finance and acquisition, you are responsible for programming, budgeting, allocating and managing approved resources. You develop strategies for long-term strategic planning and communicate agency priorities, goals and requirements to managers, employees, partners and the American public. You work to achieve the best mix of forces, equipment and support possible within available resources.
Human intelligence (HUMINT) gives actionable intelligence to warfighters working on the front lines of national defense. You will perform a wide variety of functions that support the mission, including overt and clandestine collection of intelligence across a range of sources and methods, manage the collection and reporting cycle and direct intelligence support to collectors and collection operations.
In human services, you manage the health, well-being and development of the workforce by conducting and implementing diverse practices across many career specialties: behavioral science, equal employment opportunity, human resources and training and education. In this career field, you will develop expertise in four competencies:
- Ethical practices—You act with integrity, take responsibility and accept accountability for timely delivery of products and services.
- Consulting—You leverage professional knowledge and expertise to provide sound and unbiased guidance to organizational stakeholders.
- Customer service—You embrace customer perspectives and are committed to continuous improvement of delivering professional, timely and exceptional services to all stakeholders based on established policies and standard operating procedures.
- Communication—You effectively express information, consider the audience and nature of the information, make clear and convincing oral presentations, listen to others, including attention to nonverbal cues, and respond appropriately.
In the information technology career, you manage, develop and deliver information technology systems and services. You assist in securing information from internal and external threats while enabling beneficial collaboration within our internal national security infrastructure.
You help DIA to synchronize and assess the entire intelligence cycle. In this career field, you are the critical link between warfighters, planners and defense intelligence analysts. As trusted advisors to senior government officials and flag officers, you coordinate and integrate diverse intelligence operations from the tactical-theater level to the national-strategic level across the following career specialties:
- Collection management
- Information sharing
- Intelligence operations management
- Joint capability development
- Intelligence support to acquisition
- Joint intelligence planning
- Joint target intelligence
- Policy and strategy
You support our mission through effective and efficient day-to-day operations spanning diverse organizations and missions. In this career field, you apply technical and administrative expertise and possess a comprehensive knowledge of laws and regulations across six specialties: facilities, information services, logistics, staff operations and strategic communications and engagement.
Learn more about office management and infrastructure careers.
You will apply scientific methods and technical tradecraft across the full range of intelligence operations in support of global technical collection, exploitation and operations. You gain a broad understanding of the entire career field while developing an expertise in one of the following specialties: research and development, technical collections, technical exploitation or technical operations.
You protect agency personnel, information, facilities and operations, as well as classified and sensitive information while executing our national security mission. As a civilian officer, you will take on challenging assignments and serve your country by performing security, countermeasure, investigative and law enforcement services. You apply a range of professional training and functional expertise to make difficult decisions that affect agency security. You are strong, a team player, integrity-driven and have the fortitude to present difficult findings to senior leadership. We need the best and the brightest to fulfill this critical mission.
You will advise leadership and mission professionals on legal issues associated with DIA operations. Using your knowledge of the law and applicable standards, rules and regulations, you advise and guide leadership and the workforce on current and emerging legal issues. Bring your legal training and skills to DIA for a career in the law like no other.
In the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), you promote the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of Defense Intelligence Agency IA programs, functions and operations; and work to prevent and detect fraud, waste and abuse. You will also:
- Conduct financial statement audits as well as performance audits and other oversight projects of specific programs, activities and functions, which may have both financial and operational aspects.
- Plan and conduct independent assessments of the design, implementation and results of DIA's operations, programs or policies.
- Conduct investigations that vary in purpose and scope and may involve alleged violations of criminal or civil laws, as well as administrative requirements and management of the OIG hotline.
- Develop, implement and manage the OIG Strategic Plan and mission support services such as data analytics, human resources, information technology, budget, staff operations and knowledge management.
Learn more about careers in the Office of the Inspector General.
In counterintelligence, you perform a wide variety of tasks in support of our mission. From technical operations to insider threat investigations, you safeguard the nation from foreign threats. You detect, identify, assess, exploit, counter and neutralize damaging efforts by foreign entities.
You develop and execute strategies that defeat our adversaries' attempts to harm us. Often collaborating across the Intelligence Community and U.S. government, you use logic, expertise and ingenuity to protect the nation from subversive activities like sabotage and espionage.