The Red Pen Approach: Cloud Engineer Finds Thrill in Problem Solving

At 10 years old, Mari Spina whiled away long Saturday afternoons with her dad in Los Angeles, Calif., tinkering with motorcycle carburetors and spark plugs. "Our conversations were very practical, mostly me asking him questions about how things worked on the bike," she says. "I became very comfortable communicating in a technical way, and it eventually became something I gravitated to."

Spina's grandfather and uncle were also "machinists" and as such, natural mechanical problem solvers. She credits them for igniting her interest in engineering and her deep love of motorcycles. How deep? Spina owns 25 bikes, rides often to "feel alive," and recently published a motorcycle-themed book: "Forest, River, Mountain, and Steed: An Adventure Rider's Love Affair with West Virginia."

Shooting for the Cloud

Before joining MITRE, Spina worked for a small company commissioned to transition a Department of Defense (DoD) data center into operations. It represented two dozen DoD data centers that had been virtualized and consolidated into what became the agency's first IT services cloud.

Spina was tapped to build the cybersecurity program for the center after the developer had delivered the systems. She quickly got up to speed and successfully implemented cyber security governance policies and procedures and achieved accreditation.

A manager at MITRE—impressed by Spina's ability to embrace a good challenge—handed her the tall order of kickstarting MITRE's cloud security capability area.

Setting the scene from a decade ago, Spina explains that industry touted security built directly into their cloud products, theoretically giving users the ability to plug and play. But providers didn't initially account for their government customers and each federal agency's unique cybersecurity requirements. Spina and her team offer critical support to help them navigate adoption and secure migration.

Her cloud-related work has evolved over the years, but it's always remained in demand. The conversation now is mostly focused on applying security to AI tools for cloud, she explains.

Spina counts her engineering degree and quantitative analysis as catalysts for her success in cybersecurity. "Adversaries are always going to find the chink in the armor," she says. "The best you can do is be prepared with good governance, effective security systems, and a good bit of monitoring."

Taking a Red Pen to Challenges

Spina's general philosophy is to "stack the deck against myself on purpose," though she's quick to clarify that she doesn't hold others to the same standard.

After failing a math exam in college, she committed to acing every subsequent test. To do so, she studied obsessively, routinely doing hundreds of sample equations as homework. Eventually her confidence grew into such certainty that she completed her engineering math exams in red pen.

"The red pen raised the bar and made me accountable," she says with a laugh. Later, in her doctoral program for engineering management, she chose the hardest advisor and advising committee to shepherd her dissertation. "I wanted to make sure that if I passed, it was because my work was really solid," she says.

'I don't work at MITRE; I play at MITRE'

Through her early career, Spina kept an eye on MITRE, filing it away as a dream workplace for our thorough approach to research and technology. Three interviews for three separate positions later, she landed her current role as a cloud security engineer.

"I don't work at MITRE; I play at MITRE," she says.

Her "play" includes incorporating AI into cloud environments for intelligence sponsors and standing up the Cloud Safe Task Force, a public-private collaborative effort between cloud service providers and government leaders for addressing whole-of-nation cybersecurity problems.

Despite her excitement about the future of cloud, she sleeps easy knowing that MITRE is the right organization to take on the task, doing all our work objectively, unencumbered by marketing, dollar signs, or politics.

Spina carries the same staunch commitment to getting it right at MITRE as she did in her college math classes many years ago and appreciates that she's not alone in her unrelenting pursuit.

"We do the research and bring solid science to the table," she says. "We're always going to do the right thing."