Building the Expertise for Modern Signals Intelligence

Margaret Monroe didn’t envision a career in open-source analysis while she earned two degrees in international relations. But the field has proved an excellent match. Today, she’s an industry leader in both areas, working as deputy technical director for Booz Allen’s signals intelligence (SIGINT) team.

Her time at Booz Allen has been “a really cool adventure,” she says, with opportunities for personal reinvention and the need for ongoing development to keep pace in an evolving field.

Read on to hear how she learned her way around the technical side of communications and analysis and why today’s security challenges demand the skills of a multidisciplinary team.

“I'm not technical by nature or by background,” Margaret says, “I evolved in that direction over my time with the company.”

She joined Booz Allen close to 15 years ago, immediately stepping into a position in the national security business as an all-source cyberthreat intelligence analyst. After a stint in threat finance, she took on open-source analysis as part of what is now known as the firm’s Chief Technology Office.

That’s when she took a break to have her first child. “It was an opportunity to reinvent myself a little bit,” she says. She rejoined the firm on the client-facing side, working on tool development and implementation. She “became technical,” she says, thanks to rigorous on-the-job learning augmented by Booz Allen’s wide array of professional development and technical upskilling programs.

By the time she took over as technical targeting lead for her current client, she says, “I was able to combine everything that I had learned up to that point.” Just a few years later, she is deputy technical director responsible for assembling flexible teams of technologists, analysts, and engineers to push the mission forward with creative new technical solutions in intelligence gathering and analysis.

Booz Allen’s SIGINT workforce is constantly evolving. Margaret says that part of that is due to personal upskilling and the pursuit of individual excellence, with analysts taking on new responsibilities and digging into new areas of technology. There are also the changing demands of the mission itself. On top of that, there is a “virtuous cycle” of innovation between the company’s lab teams and client-facing solutions.

The cycle passes insights and new ideas between Booz Allen groups like Booz Allen Wavy Labs™, which works on new uses of AI in radio signals processing, and teams like Margaret’s, which works directly with clients. “We are able to integrate some of their knowledge into our customer spaces and then share feedback with them to iterate and improve,” says Margaret. “It's a great demonstration of industry and onsite teams working together to solve problems more quickly by working together and learning from each other than they would by working separately.”

The result is a signals intelligence team bursting with creative solutions that draw on a dozen forms of expertise. “Under the hood,” Margaret says, “there are a lot of different skillsets working in a concerted way to help the client reach their objectives. We have technical targeters, developers, all-source analysts, and engineers. All are working together to learn as much as they can about a given subject and then help our customer understand it.”

And her role? It’s about perspective, coordination, and finding gaps that need to be filled. “My job is to suture all of that together, so everyone works most effectively as one body,” says Margaret. “Where can one area of expertise help another team learn more about a given problem? How do we consolidate efforts to reduce duplication?”

“Way back when,” Margaret says, “what brought me to Booz Allen was our reputation as a company that did high-quality work and had high-quality people. What has kept me here is both that I have been able to evolve and that I have seen the company evolve alongside our national security clients.”

There’s a sentiment around the high-stakes nature of SIGINT work that Margaret hears a lot from her teammates. In SIGINT, “there are days when you know that your work has paid off and days when you know that you have to do better. But the throughline is that everybody is doing their damnedest to meet the client's mission,” she says. “I don't think people tend to stick around if they don't have that drive, that single-mindedness.”

The payoff for that single-mindedness can be tremendous. “Something happens at work, and a couple days later, you see it on the news,” she says. “And you know that you helped, and that you made a difference.”