AI Solutions Engineer

The Aerospace Corporation is the trusted partner to the nation’s space programs, solving the hardest problems and providing unmatched technical expertise. As the operator of a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), we are broadly engaged across all aspects of space— delivering innovative solutions that span satellite, launch, ground, and cyber systems for defense, civil and commercial customers. When you join our team, you’ll be part of a special collection of problem solvers, thought leaders, and innovators. Join us and take your place in space.

The Digital Innovation Division (DID) is accountable for generating and executing integrated strategies, providing governance, and managing internal investments that form the foundation of Aerospace’s digital transformation.

The Digital Innovation Division is seeking Senior Project Engineers to serve as technical project leads for initiatives within the corporate AI portfolio, reporting to the Director, AI Systems and Delivery. Each lead owns one initiative end to end: its technical approach, its requirements and architecture, its cost and schedule, and the working relationships with the engineers and subject matter experts whose work the capability depends on.

We expect to fill more than one of these positions. Current and planned initiatives include an agentic platform that gives AI controlled, secure access to subject matter expert tools, databases, physics models, and document collections, spanning component engineering, modeling and simulation, verification and validation, and spectral phenomenology; enterprise agentic AI, covering orchestration, tool and data integration, and agent lifecycle management at enterprise scale; AI for software engineering, covering agentic coding assistants and developer productivity across the engineering population; and modeling, simulation, and digital engineering tooling. Depth in one of these areas matters more than breadth across all of them, and assignment is determined during hiring based on your background.

This is a technical leadership position rather than a people-management position. You will lead a project team drawn from across the corporation, hold the technical decisions for your initiative, and remain close enough to the work to judge whether what is being built is sound. You will be expected to tell us what should not be built as readily as what should.

Work Model:

This is a full-time position based 100% onsite in Colorado Springs, Co, Chantilly, Va, or El Segundo, Ca.

What Corporate Skills You’ll Bring

• Ability to build trusted working relationships with engineers, subject matter experts, and senior stakeholders
• Leading and delivering complex technical initiatives across classified and unclassified environments
• Taking new and emerging initiatives from concept through execution when requirements are still forming
• Bringing together cross functional teams, technology, and mission priorities to drive impact.
• Understanding of evolving priorities, and translate mission and business needs into technical approaches and delivered capability.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Serve as the technical project lead for an assigned AI initiative, owning its technical approach, requirements, architecture, roadmap, and technical dependencies.
• Lead the project team day to day, including engineers, subject matter experts, and partner organizations who do not report to you, and set the technical direction they work to.
• Own cost and schedule performance for your initiative, including estimates, milestone commitments, variance, and the funding requests that support it.
• Decompose a loosely defined capability goal into scoped increments that deliver something usable, and sequence them so value arrives before the full vision does.
• Define what good looks like for your capability and measure it, including evaluation criteria, acceptance tests, and the performance thresholds a capability must meet before it reaches users.
• Identify, track, and retire technical risk, and raise disconnects that cannot be resolved at the project level rather than absorbing them quietly.
• Work with subject matter experts to capture how expert work is actually performed, and translate that into tools, data, and agent behavior that engineers will trust and use.
• Partner with platform, data, security, and accreditation teams to field capability in the environments where the work happens, including accredited networks.
• Represent your initiative in technical reviews, program management reviews, and stakeholder forums, and brief its status honestly, including what is behind and why.
• Document the technical baseline and keep it current, so the initiative does not depend on what is in your head.
• Mentor engineers on the project and grow AI delivery skill across the team.

What You Need to be Successful: Senior Project Engineer-

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, Information Systems, Operations, Aerospace Engineering, Physics, STEM or a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• 8 years of progressive technical experience in AI/ML engineering, software or systems engineering, modeling and simulation, or a comparable engineering discipline, including delivering working capability to real users.
• Demonstrated experience leading a technical project or team, including accountability for technical approach, cost, and schedule, without relying on formal reporting authority over the team.
• Working proficiency in Python and practical experience building with modern AI/ML tooling, which may include large language model APIs, agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval augmented generation, evaluation harnesses, or classical ML and simulation frameworks.
• Ability to reason about system design and make defensible architecture decisions, including data flow, integration with existing tools and databases, and the tradeoffs between what is fast to build and what is sustainable.
• Working understanding of cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and of how capability moves from prototype to a supported production environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work directly with subject matter experts or customers to elicit requirements, and to translate domain expertise into technical requirements.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to brief technical status and technical risk to leadership clearly and without overstating progress.

• Willing to travel approximately 25% of the time to support customer meeting and technical collaboration.
• This position requires ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance, which is issued by the U.S. government. U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a security clearance.

How You Can Stand Out 

It would be impressive if you have one or more of these:

• Advanced degree in a STEM or other technical discipline.
• 12+ years of technical experience, including leading multi-person technical projects to delivery.
• Direct mission experience in the national space domain, missile defense, or remote sensing.
• Experience building agentic AI systems that call tools, query databases, or drive physics models, and the evaluation work required to show they are reliable enough to use.
• Experience deploying AI capability that engineers adopted and kept using, with evidence of sustained use rather than a successful demonstration.
• Depth in one of these engineering domains: component engineering, modeling and simulation, verification and validation, or spectral phenomenology.
• Experience with agentic coding assistants or developer productivity tooling at organizational scale.
• Experience delivering capability on accredited networks, or working within authorization to operate and continuous monitoring processes.
• Experience establishing evaluation criteria or acceptance gates for AI capability, including deciding that something was not ready to field.
• Experience standing up a capability in its earliest phase, before requirements, funding, or customer scope were fully defined.
• Current DoD TS and SSBI/SCI clearance.

We offer a competitive compensation package where you’ll be rewarded based on your performance and recognized for the value you bring to our business.  The grade-based pay range for this job is listed below.  Individual salaries within that range are determined through a wide variety of factors including but not limited to education, experience, knowledge and skills.

(Min - Max)

Leadership Competencies

Our leadership philosophy is simple: every employee, regardless of level and role, can demonstrate leadership. At Aerospace, our commitment is our people. To cultivate our talent and ensure that we have a strong pipeline of future leaders, we want individuals who:

• Operate Strategically
• Lead Change   
• Engage with Impact   
• Foster Innovation   
• Deliver Results  

Ways We Reward Our Employees

During your interview process, our team will provide details of our industry-leading benefits.

Benefits vary and are applicable based on Job Type.  A few highlights include:

• Comprehensive health care and wellness plans

• Paid holidays, sick time, and vacation

• Standard and alternate work schedules, including telework options

• 401(k) Plan — Employees receive a total company-paid benefit of 8%, 10%, or 12% of eligible compensation based on years of service and matching contributions; employees are immediately eligible and vested in the plan upon hire

• Flexible spending accounts

• Variable pay program for exceptional contributions

• Relocation assistance

• Professional growth and development programs to help advance your career

• Education assistance programs

• An inclusive work environment built on teamwork, flexibility, and respect

We are all unique, from various backgrounds and all walks of life, yet one thing bonds all of us to each other—the belief that we can make a difference. This core belief empowers us to do our best work at The Aerospace Corporation.

Equal Opportunity Commitment

The Aerospace Corporation is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, color, religion, genetic information, marital status, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, physical disability, medical condition, mental disability, or disability status and any other characteristic protected by state or federal law. If you’re an individual with a disability or a disabled veteran who needs assistance using our online job search and application tools or need reasonable accommodation to complete the job application process, please contact us by phone at 310.336.5432 or by email at peoplemangmnt.mailbox@aero.org . You can also review Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal.