How to Apply to The Aerospace Corporation

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 128 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • The Aerospace Corporation is a ~4,500-person nonprofit FFRDC primarily sponsored by the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, with additional work for NASA, NOAA, MDA, and the intelligence community; headquarters is in Chantilly, VA with the largest technical site in El Segundo, CA.
  • All applications flow through Workday at aerospace.org/careers (aero.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External), with an Eightfold-powered talent network at talent.aerospace.org for AI-matched recommendations and clearance-holder communities.
  • US citizenship is mandatory for nearly every technical role, and at least a Secret clearance is required for almost all employees in technical organizations; many roles require Top Secret with SCI eligibility and CI or full-scope polygraph.
  • The hiring process averages roughly 30 to 60 days for cleared candidates and substantially longer for first-time clearance applicants; expect a recruiter screen, a hiring manager call, and a three-to-six-person panel covering technical depth, behavioral STAR, and a presentation of your prior work.
  • Resumes should put citizenship and clearance status at the top, quantify mission/engineering outcomes, mirror Aerospace and DoD vocabulary verbatim (SE&I, mission assurance, MBSE, AFSIM, STK, NSSL, SDA, OPIR, SBIRS, AEHF, GPS III), and surface degrees, publications, and patents prominently.
  • Interviews are conducted by working senior engineers and scientists (many PhDs); expect first-principles whiteboard problems in your domain, deep probes of your thesis or prior program work, and explicit clearance and FFRDC-charter conversations in every loop.
  • Aerospace runs strong pipelines for early career (internships for sophomores through graduate students), mid-career hires from primes/government/Space Force, returners (Career Re-entry Program), and senior fellows; intern-to-MTS conversion is a major hiring channel.
  • Compensation is competitive within the FFRDC/government-services sector with a heavy emphasis on retirement (8/10/12% company-paid plus match, immediate vesting), 9/80 schedules, generous PTO, four weeks of paid parental leave, and tuition reimbursement up to PhD-level study.
  • Cultural fit favors mission-driven, intellectually serious, peer-review-friendly engineers and scientists who want a long technical-ladder career as the government's independent advisor rather than a prime-contractor or pure-startup trajectory.

About The Aerospace Corporation

The Aerospace Corporation is a California-incorporated nonprofit that operates a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) chartered in 1960 to provide independent technical oversight, objective engineering analysis, and mission assurance for the United States' national security space programs. It was created on the recommendation of House Report 1121 (September 1959), which urged the conversion of Space Technology Laboratories into an independent nonprofit so that the government would have an unconflicted technical advisor sitting between it and prime contractors. Today the corporation employs approximately 4,500 people, of whom roughly 79 percent are technical staff, including more than 860 PhDs spanning aerospace engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, materials science, electrical and systems engineering, signal processing, atmospheric science, and operations research. The company's principal customer base is the United States Space Force (USSF) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), with additional sponsorship and program work for NASA, NOAA, the Missile Defense Agency, the intelligence community, allied governments, and select commercial space operators through fee-for-service work permitted by its FFRDC charter. Aerospace's headquarters relocated from El Segundo, California to Chantilly, Virginia in recent years to sit closer to NRO and Space Force headquarters elements, but El Segundo remains the corporation's largest single technical site, located in the historical heart of the United States military space industrial base on the edge of Los Angeles Air Force Base / Space Systems Command. Other significant offices include Colorado Springs (Space Warfighting Center, supporting Space Operations Command and the U.S. Space Command), Albuquerque (Kirtland AFB, supporting AFRL and nuclear deterrence missions), Houston (NASA Johnson Space Center support), Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg Space Force Base, Huntsville, Dayton, Maryland (NRO and intelligence community sites), and a small set of overseas liaison locations. Revenue was approximately 1.29 billion dollars in fiscal year 2023. The corporation's five DoD-recognized core competencies are launch certification, system-of-systems engineering, systems development and acquisition support, process implementation, and technology application; in practical terms it sits across the full lifecycle of national security space, from architecture studies and acquisition strategy through subsystem trade studies, independent cost estimation, anomaly resolution, on-orbit operations support, and end-of-life debris analysis through its Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS). Aerospace shared the 1992 Robert J. Collier Trophy for its contributions to the development of the Global Positioning System and is one of a small number of FFRDCs whose work fundamentally shapes how the United States buys, builds, and operates space systems.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Search and apply at aerospace

    Search and apply at aerospace.org/careers, which routes all external requisitions into Workday under the aero tenant (aero.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External); a separate Eightfold-powered talent network at talent.aerospace.org lets you create a profile, receive AI-matched role recommendations, and join talent communities for clearance holders, students, and the Career Re-entry Program.

  2. 2
    Create one Workday candidate profile, complete the structured fields (degrees, c

    Create one Workday candidate profile, complete the structured fields (degrees, citizenship, clearance, publications, technical skills) thoroughly, and reuse it across requisitions; you can track each application from the candidate home page by clicking the cloud icon in the upper right and viewing 'My Submitted Applications.'

  3. 3
    Recruiters typically respond within one to three weeks for shortlisted candidate

    Recruiters typically respond within one to three weeks for shortlisted candidates with a 30-minute phone screen covering technical background, US citizenship and clearance status, salary expectations, location preference (El Segundo, Chantilly, Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Cape Canaveral, etc.), and motivation for FFRDC versus prime contractor or government work.

  4. 4
    A hiring manager interview follows, almost always with a working senior engineer

    A hiring manager interview follows, almost always with a working senior engineer, project leader, or department head rather than a career interviewer; for technical staff roles expect deep dives into your thesis, prior projects, specific tools (MATLAB, Python, STK, GMAT, Cameo/MagicDraw, AFSIM, SLATE, FreeFlyer), and the physics or math underlying your domain.

  5. 5
    Onsite or virtual loops typically include three to six interviews across the pro

    Onsite or virtual loops typically include three to six interviews across the prospective department and adjacent groups, mixing technical whiteboard problems, behavioral STAR questions, a presentation of your prior research or program work to a panel, and at least one conversation focused on collaboration with sponsors and prime contractors.

  6. 6
    Conditional offers are followed by a Secret-clearance application at minimum (SF

    Conditional offers are followed by a Secret-clearance application at minimum (SF-86 via the e-QIP/eApp system); most operational and program-engineering roles require an existing or upgradeable Top Secret with SCI eligibility and a counterintelligence or full-scope polygraph, and start dates often slip 60 to 180+ days while clearance reciprocity or a new investigation completes.

  7. 7
    End-to-end timelines average roughly 30 to 60 days from application to offer for

    End-to-end timelines average roughly 30 to 60 days from application to offer for cleared candidates and substantially longer for first-time clearance applicants; intern and Career Re-entry Program candidates follow cohort calendars (summer internship offers concentrate January through March).

Resume Tips for The Aerospace Corporation

recommended

State US citizenship and clearance status (None / Secret / Top Secret / TS-SCI /

State US citizenship and clearance status (None / Secret / Top Secret / TS-SCI / TS-SCI with CI poly / Full Scope poly) at the top of the resume in plain text; clearance is a hard prerequisite for most requisitions and Workday/Eightfold and recruiters screen on it literally.

recommended

Lead each role with quantified mission and engineering outcomes: launch vehicle

Lead each role with quantified mission and engineering outcomes: launch vehicle anomalies resolved, mission assurance reviews led, dollars of independent cost estimate variance defended, subsystem mass or power margin recovered, error budgets closed, ConOps trade studies delivered, or on-orbit incidents triaged, with the specific program where appropriate (and only at the unclassified level).

recommended

Mirror the vocabulary used in the job description verbatim: SE&I, mission assura

Mirror the vocabulary used in the job description verbatim: SE&I, mission assurance, GN&C, RF/SATCOM, electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR), SAR, PNT, SDA/SSA, MBSE (Cameo/SysML), AFSIM, STK, GMAT, FreeFlyer, EELV/NSSL, SDA Tranche 1/2, GPS III/IIIF, SBIRS/Next-Gen OPIR, AEHF, WGS, MUOS, ESS, FORGE, JADC2, since Workday keyword screening is literal.

recommended

Surface degrees and academic pedigree prominently (BS/MS/PhD field, university,

Surface degrees and academic pedigree prominently (BS/MS/PhD field, university, year, GPA if 3.5+); Aerospace hires heavily into a research-oriented technical-ladder culture, and PhDs, publications, conference papers (AIAA, IEEE Aerospace, AAS, AMOS), patents, and teaching experience are first-class signals.

recommended

For early-career and Member of Technical Staff (MTS) candidates, list relevant c

For early-career and Member of Technical Staff (MTS) candidates, list relevant coursework, advisor, capstone or thesis topic in one or two sentences, and any spacecraft, CubeSat, rocket, drone, or robotics team leadership; intern conversion is a major hiring pipeline so internship experience anywhere in national-security space is highly valued.

recommended

Translate military and government experience into Aerospace-relevant signals: Sp

Translate military and government experience into Aerospace-relevant signals: Space Force / Space Operations Command tours, NRO assignments, AFRL or NASA program offices, acquisition or PEO experience, DAWIA certifications (Engineering, Program Management, T&E), launch range work, satellite operations crew positions, and any tour at SMC/SSC, Schriever, Buckley, Patrick, or Vandenberg.

recommended

Keep the resume clean, single-column, and Workday-parseable: avoid columns, tabl

Keep the resume clean, single-column, and Workday-parseable: avoid columns, tables, headers/footers with embedded data, text-in-images, and exotic fonts; submit as PDF or DOCX with clear section headers (Clearance, Education, Experience, Publications, Patents, Awards, Skills) and never include classified program details, classified performance data, or codeword names.

recommended

For Career Re-entry Program (returnship) and experienced-hire candidates, explic

For Career Re-entry Program (returnship) and experienced-hire candidates, explicitly call out the gap, the reason, the skills you maintained or refreshed, and any independent study, open-source work, or certifications (AWS, MBSE, INCOSE CSEP/ESEP, PMP, CISSP) that show currency; Aerospace runs a formal returnship cohort and these resumes are read by people who expect to see the gap addressed plainly.

ATS System: Workday (with Eightfold AI talent network)

The Aerospace Corporation hosts all external requisitions in Workday under the aero tenant at aero.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External, surfaced through aerospace.org/careers. A parallel Eightfold AI talent platform at talent.aerospace.org provides AI-driven role matching, talent communities for cleared candidates, students, and Career Re-entry Program returners, and a 'My Submitted Applications' status view accessible from the candidate home page (cloud icon, top right). Workday performs literal keyword screening against your resume and the structured Workday profile fields (degrees, GPA, publications, skills, citizenship, clearance), so the structured fields matter as much as the resume itself.

  • Create one Workday candidate profile and complete every structured field (degrees, GPA, publications, patents, skills, US citizenship, current clearance level, polygraph status) — the AI matcher and recruiters filter on these fields, not just on the resume PDF.
  • Mirror Aerospace and DoD vocabulary verbatim from the job description: SE&I, mission assurance, MBSE/SysML/Cameo, AFSIM, STK, GMAT, FreeFlyer, NSSL/EELV, SDA Tranche 1/2, GPS III/IIIF, SBIRS / Next-Gen OPIR, AEHF, WGS, MUOS, ESS, FORGE, JADC2.
  • Put US citizenship and clearance status (None / Secret / TS / TS-SCI / TS-SCI with CI or full-scope poly) in the top section of your resume; these are the first filters recruiters apply.
  • Use a clean single-column resume in PDF or DOCX with no tables, columns, headers/footers with embedded data, or text-in-images, since Workday's parser fails silently on those layouts and your data may not populate the profile correctly.
  • Also create a profile in the Eightfold talent network at talent.aerospace.org and join the relevant talent communities (e.g., cleared engineers, students, Career Re-entry); recruiters source from Eightfold for hard-to-fill cleared roles separately from open Workday requisitions.
  • Track each application from the Workday candidate home (cloud icon → Home → My Submitted Applications); status changes (Under Consideration, Interview, Offer) are the canonical signal, not recruiter email.

Complete Workday (with Eightfold AI talent network) Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Aerospace Corporation interviews are technically deep, deliberately collegial, and shaped by the FFRDC mission of being the smartest, most independent voice in the room.

Interviewers are almost always working engineers, scientists, project leaders, and department heads, many of them PhDs from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, the Ivies, and top public engineering programs, and they treat the interview as the start of a long professional relationship rather than a screening transaction. Expect them to weigh first-principles technical reasoning, intellectual honesty, communication, and willingness to engage in respectful technical disagreement as heavily as raw credential strength. A typical opening question asks you to walk through a specific project, paper, or program contribution in detail, and the panel will probe assumptions, error analysis, alternative approaches, what surprised you, and what you would do differently with another year and budget; vague ownership claims, hand-waving on math, or polished narratives that hide failure tend to land poorly because the people across the table have built and reviewed real space systems and can tell when somebody is bluffing. Behavioral questions follow the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and frequently target collaboration with sponsors and prime contractors, navigating disagreement with a senior engineer, escalating a mission-assurance concern, owning a technical recommendation that the customer initially rejected, and balancing schedule pressure against doing it right. Technical interviews vary sharply by discipline. Astrodynamics, GN&C, propulsion, and structures candidates face whiteboard derivations of orbital mechanics, control loops, rocket-equation problems, modal analysis, and thermal balance questions. RF, SATCOM, signal-processing, and EO/IR candidates face link-budget problems, antenna and detector trade-offs, SNR and noise-figure analysis, SAR processing chains, and detection-theory questions. Software, data, and digital engineering candidates face systems-design problems anchored in real space-domain constraints (bandwidth, latency, radiation, FPGA versus CPU), MBSE/Cameo questions, and modest coding rounds in Python, MATLAB, or C++. Systems engineers face requirements-decomposition exercises, V-model and SE&I questions, independent cost estimate methodology, and risk-cube reasoning. Across every loop you should expect an explicit conversation about US citizenship, clearance status, willingness to undergo polygraph if required, and your understanding of the FFRDC charter and the conflict-of-interest rules that come with it. Aerospace screens hard for humility, curiosity, and the ability to be the technical adult in a room full of contractors, government program offices, and warfighters; interviewers respond well to candidates who admit what they do not know, ask sharp clarifying questions, and treat the interview as a two-way fit conversation rather than a performance.

What The Aerospace Corporation Looks For

  • US citizenship and either an active Secret/TS/TS-SCI clearance or willingness and ability (no foreign-influence, financial, or substance-related concerns) to obtain and maintain one, since virtually every technical role requires at least Secret and many require TS-SCI with CI or full-scope polygraph.
  • Deep technical foundation in a relevant discipline (aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, signal processing, software engineering, materials, systems engineering) at the BS, MS, or PhD level, with the ability to reason from first principles rather than recite tools.
  • Mission orientation toward national security space, civil space, or space situational awareness; candidates who articulate why they want to serve as the government's independent technical advisor (rather than build product at a prime contractor or startup) consistently do better.
  • Strong written and oral communication, including the ability to brief senior government and military leaders, write technical memos and independent assessments, and translate engineering analysis into acquisition or operational recommendations.
  • Sponsor- and contractor-facing maturity: the ability to push back on a flawed design, a schedule-driven shortcut, or an underspecified requirement while preserving the working relationship and the program's forward momentum.
  • Collaborative, peer-review-friendly working style suited to a research-organization culture where ideas are challenged openly, technical ladders matter, and individual contributors can have very long, distinguished careers without managing people.
  • Diversity of background that maps to mission needs: cleared software and data engineers, RF and EO/IR specialists, astrodynamicists, MBSE practitioners, cyber and resilience engineers, AI/ML researchers, and program-management professionals with DoD acquisition experience are all in active demand.
  • Cultural fit with a mission-driven, intellectually serious, low-ego nonprofit where the work product (an independent assessment, a launch-readiness review, a mission-assurance memo) is the deliverable and the customer is the United States government, not a quarterly earnings call.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is The Aerospace Corporation headquartered, and where are most jobs located?
The corporate headquarters relocated from El Segundo, California to Chantilly, Virginia to sit closer to the National Reconnaissance Office and Space Force headquarters elements, but El Segundo remains the largest single technical site, co-located with Space Systems Command (formerly SMC) on the edge of Los Angeles Air Force Base. Other significant offices include Colorado Springs (Space Warfighting Center, supporting Space Operations Command and US Space Command), Albuquerque (Kirtland AFB), Houston (NASA Johnson), Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg Space Force Base, Huntsville, Dayton, and additional Maryland and Virginia sites supporting the NRO and the broader intelligence community. The largest concentration of openings is typically in El Segundo, Chantilly, and Colorado Springs.
What ATS does Aerospace use, and how should I optimize my resume for it?
Aerospace uses Workday as its primary applicant tracking system, hosted at aero.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External and surfaced through aerospace.org/careers, with an Eightfold AI talent platform at talent.aerospace.org acting as a parallel matching and talent-community layer. To optimize, mirror the exact technical vocabulary in the job description (SE&I, mission assurance, MBSE/Cameo, AFSIM, STK, NSSL, SDA, GPS III/IIIF, SBIRS, OPIR, AEHF, WGS, MUOS, ESS, FORGE, JADC2, etc.), put citizenship and clearance status at the top, use a clean single-column layout with no tables or text-in-images, and submit as PDF or DOCX. Complete every structured Workday field (degrees, GPA, publications, skills, citizenship, clearance) since both Workday and Eightfold rank candidates against those fields, not just the resume.
Do I need US citizenship and a security clearance to work at Aerospace?
US citizenship is a hard requirement for the vast majority of technical roles because Aerospace works on classified national security space programs. All employees in organizations with technical responsibilities are required to apply for and maintain at least a Secret clearance, and a substantial share of roles require Top Secret with SCI eligibility, often with a counterintelligence or full-scope polygraph. If you do not currently hold a clearance you can still apply, but the offer will be conditional on a successful investigation and your start date can slip 60 to 180+ days. A small number of corporate, IT, facilities, and unclassified research roles do not require clearance, but they are a minority of the requisitions.
How long does the hiring process take?
For candidates with an active clearance the end-to-end process averages roughly 30 to 60 days from application to offer based on Glassdoor and Indeed self-reports, with a recruiter screen, a hiring-manager interview, and a panel loop. For candidates without a clearance the offer itself can come in that window, but the start date is gated by the clearance investigation, which can take six months or longer for a first-time Secret and substantially longer for TS/SCI with polygraph. Interns and Career Re-entry Program candidates follow cohort calendars; summer intern decisions concentrate January through March.
What is the Member of Technical Staff (MTS) ladder, and how does it work?
Aerospace organizes most of its technical workforce on a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) ladder that runs from MTS to Senior MTS (SMTS), Engineering Specialist, Senior Engineering Specialist, and Distinguished Engineer, with parallel paths into project leadership, department management, and senior fellow roles. The ladder is genuinely dual-track: a strong individual contributor can have a multi-decade career, publish, mentor, and lead programs without ever managing people. Entry-level MTS roles typically expect a relevant Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD; SMTS and above usually require multiple years of relevant experience and demonstrated technical leadership on programs.
What internship and early-career programs does Aerospace offer?
Aerospace runs a structured internship program for rising sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students enrolled full time in an accredited US degree program, typically running 10+ weeks during summer with mentorship from senior technical staff, the TECTalk speaker series, and social and professional development programming. The corporation also runs a formal Aerospace Career Re-entry Program (returnship) for experienced engineers and scientists returning to the workforce after a career break, and a Pathways-style early-career hiring channel for recent BS/MS/PhD graduates. Intern-to-MTS conversion is a major hiring pipeline, so a successful internship is one of the strongest paths into a full-time role.
How is Aerospace different from a prime contractor or a Space Force civilian role?
As an FFRDC, Aerospace is structurally barred from competing for production contracts, manufacturing hardware for sale, or representing a single commercial interest. Its product is independent technical judgment delivered to government sponsors, which means engineers spend their time on architecture studies, trade analyses, independent cost estimates, mission-assurance reviews, anomaly resolution, and operational support across many programs and many contractors, rather than building one product on one program. Compared to a Space Force civilian (DoD GS) role, Aerospace offers private-sector compensation and a research-organization culture; compared to a prime contractor it offers neutrality, breadth across the entire national security space portfolio, and a much heavier concentration of PhDs and long-tenure technical experts.
What is the compensation and benefits package like?
Compensation is competitive within the FFRDC and government-services sector and varies by clearance level, location, and ladder rung. The benefits package is unusually strong on retirement: a total company-paid retirement contribution of 8, 10, or 12 percent of eligible compensation based on years of service, plus a matching contribution, with immediate eligibility and immediate vesting on hire. Time off includes 15 to 20 days of PTO based on tenure plus the option of a 9/80 schedule with alternate Fridays off. Family benefits include four weeks of company-paid parental leave taken within twelve months of birth, adoption, or foster placement. Educational assistance covers tuition reimbursement, fellowship support, and educational assignments through the PhD level.
What does Aerospace look for in software, data, and AI/ML candidates specifically?
For software, data, and AI/ML roles Aerospace looks for engineers who can ground their work in real space-domain constraints (bandwidth, latency, radiation, FPGA versus CPU, intermittent connectivity, classified-network deployment) rather than generic SaaS framing. Strong candidates show experience with Python, C++, MATLAB, modern MLOps, AWS GovCloud or Azure Government, secure coding, model evaluation under data-scarce conditions, and integration with simulation environments such as AFSIM, STK, and GMAT. MBSE fluency (Cameo/MagicDraw, SysML), digital-engineering experience, and any cleared software work on Space Force, NRO, NASA, or intelligence-community programs are all heavily weighted.
Does Aerospace hire veterans and transitioning military, including Space Force Guardians?
Yes. Aerospace actively recruits transitioning military and Space Force Guardians, particularly officers and senior enlisted with backgrounds in space operations, satellite control, launch operations, acquisition (PEO/SMC/SSC), nuclear and missile fields, intelligence, cyber, and engineering specialties. SkillBridge fellowships, SF Guardian career conversions, and dedicated veteran-hiring outreach are part of the standard pipeline. Translate your military experience into civilian engineering and program-management language, list DAWIA certifications, and keep your clearance active during transition since reciprocity into Aerospace is much faster when your clearance has not lapsed.

Open Positions

The Aerospace Corporation currently has 128 open positions.

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