Collins Aerospace Is Hiring Across Three Continents on a $158.5 Million Factory Spending Spree — and the Roles Span AI Strategy Directors to Shop-Floor Technicians

A $63 Million Bet on Malaysia's Aerospace Future

Collins Aerospace is spending $63 million to quadruple its maintenance, repair, and overhaul footprint in Malaysia, a move that reshapes where the company services aircraft across the Asia-Pacific region and immediately opens a pipeline of skilled aerospace roles. The expansion at Subang Aerotech Park in Selangor grows the facility from 46,000 to 164,000 square feet, making it Collins' key regional hub for advanced component MRO. The transition is on track to finish by the end of 2026.

The investment is a direct bet on Asia-Pacific fleet growth. MRO demand across the region is expected to double over the next two decades, and Collins intends to grow alongside it. The Subang facility will service critical components (air cycle machines, heat exchangers, valves, and next-generation starters) for aircraft including the Boeing 787, Boeing 777, and Airbus A380. It will also deploy autonomous mobile robots, digital tier boards, eAndon systems, and real-time location tracking to cut turnaround times.

"The Asia-Pacific region is a key growth market for the industry, and this investment ensures that we grow alongside our customers," said Irene Makris, president of Power & Controls at Collins Aerospace. "Malaysia offers the right environment for us to scale, and we are planning to double employment opportunities for skilled talent in the region."

Collins currently employs about 150 people in Malaysia. Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook said at the launch that the facility's workforce is expected to grow 30 to 50 percent over the next five to 10 years, creating what he called "a pipeline of high-skilled, technically intensive jobs in aerospace maintenance and engineering." Across Asia-Pacific, Collins has roughly 10,000 employees in 24 locations spanning eight countries: Singapore, China, India, Australia, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines among them.

Malaysia has been actively positioning itself as an MRO hub under its Aerospace Industry Blueprint 2030, which targets RM 55 billion (roughly $13.6 billion) in MRO revenue by decade's end. The country's pitch rests on geographic advantage, lower operating costs than neighboring Singapore, and a policy framework designed to attract long-term aerospace investment. Loke told attendees at the Subang launch that Malaysia intends to be "at the centre of that growth, not as a passive beneficiary, but as an active participant."

The Subang facility was built with a smart building management system to optimize utility consumption, integrated safety systems, and equipment designed for improved ergonomics and reduced environmental impact — infrastructure choices that signal Collins plans to operate there for decades. Since 2021, the company has completed a rolling series of MRO expansions across Asia-Pacific, adding capabilities in electrical power systems, environmental and airframe control systems, and engine control systems. The Malaysia investment is the largest single step in that campaign and the one most explicitly tied to hiring.

Poland's Landing Gear Factory Gets a $69 Million Boost

Collins Aerospace opened its expanded 22,000-square-meter manufacturing facility in Tajęcina, Poland on June 2, 2026, following a $69 million investment that boosted landing gear system production capacity by nearly 25% across both commercial and defense aircraft programs. The site will create roughly 190 new jobs this year.

The Tajęcina facility, which first opened in 2012, produces main, nose, and wing landing gear assemblies (high-strength metal systems integrated with steering, braking, and control electronics). Teams at the nearby Krosno site support the same product lines. Matt Maurer, vice president and general manager of Landing Systems at Collins Aerospace, called the expansion "a long-term investment in both the local workforce and the future of aerospace in the broader Poland ecosystem."

The Poland expansion is not an isolated move. It runs parallel to Pratt & Whitney's $100 million investment in its Rzeszów facility, announced in April 2026, which will add isothermal forging, heat treatment, and inspection capabilities for critical engine components. That project is expected to increase output of rotating compressor and turbine disks by 30% and reach full operation by 2028.

Together, the two investments underscore Poland's role as RTX's largest employee base and investment footprint outside the United States. The company employs more than 9,400 people across its Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon businesses in the country, operating nine major engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, and research facilities. RTX has maintained a presence in Poland for over 50 years.

For job seekers, the Tajęcina expansion means a concentrated wave of manufacturing and production engineering roles landing in a single European site — a pattern that mirrors the hiring surge Collins is driving simultaneously in Malaysia and Florida.

Florida Radar Plant Scales Up on a $438 Million Contract

Collins Aerospace is putting $26.5 million into its Largo, Florida facility to expand radar production capacity, a move that will add over 100 new jobs across engineering and factory operations. The investment, announced May 11, 2026, targets a facility that already produces radars, satellite and secure communications components, and test systems for both commercial and military customers.

The Largo site will handle production work tied to the FAA's Radar System Replacement Program, a $438 million contract Collins Aerospace won in January 2026. That program requires the company to deliver Condor Mk3 cooperative surveillance radars and ASR-XM non-cooperative radars to modernize the National Airspace System. The new production area is expected to be fully operational by late 2026.

Nate Boelkins, president of Avionics at Collins Aerospace, said the expansion "strengthens our ability to deliver critical capabilities that keep airline passengers safe and military operators mission-ready, faster."

RTX, Collins' parent company, has operated in Florida for more than four decades and employs over 7,000 people across eight major locations in the state. Florida Secretary of Commerce J. Alex Kelly said the expansion "bolsters the growing Tampa Bay-area military and defense cluster."

The hiring is not confined to one tier. The 100-plus roles span engineering and factory operations disciplines, meaning the Largo expansion is pulling in both design-side talent and production-floor technicians simultaneously. That mirrors the pattern at Collins' Malaysia and Poland sites, where maintenance technicians and manufacturing engineers are being brought on in parallel.

RTX's broader manufacturing network has been on a spending spree. Raytheon committed $100 million to expand radar testing and interceptor production in Rhode Island in June. The Largo investment is smaller in dollar terms, but it sits at the intersection of two demand streams (commercial airspace modernization and defense multi-domain security) that are both accelerating.

For job seekers, the signal is straightforward: Collins is building physical production capacity in Florida while simultaneously standing up new programs that require both engineers and shop-floor operators. The roles are live, the facility is expanding, and the contract backing it is already awarded.

The Role Spectrum: From AI Strategy Directors to Shop-Floor Technicians

The hiring surge Collins Aerospace is driving across Malaysia, Poland, and Florida isn't concentrated in one tier of the org chart. It stretches from the C-suite strategy layer down to the technicians who torque bolts on the production line — and the breadth of that span is what makes it matter for job seekers who don't fit the stereotypical "defense contractor" mold.

At the top end, Collins is recruiting for senior roles tied to command-and-control systems and AI integration. These are positions that sit at the intersection of defense doctrine and machine learning — directors and principal engineers who shape how autonomous and semi-autonomous platforms process sensor data, coordinate across domains, and feed decision loops back to human operators. The titles vary (AI Strategy Director, C2 Systems Architect, Autonomous Mission Planner), but the through-line is the same: Collins wants people who can translate military operational requirements into technical architectures, and who understand that a model that works in a lab can fail catastrophically when a pilot's life depends on it.

Mid-career roles form the bulk of the hiring. Manufacturing engineers, quality assurance leads, and supply-chain analysts are needed at every site. Malaysia's MRO hub needs technicians certified on specific airframe platforms, Poland's expanded factory needs process engineers who can stand up new production cells, and the Largo facility needs production supervisors who can scale output without degrading yield. These aren't glamorous titles, but they're the roles that determine whether a facility investment actually delivers aircraft components on time.

At the entry level, Collins is pulling in early-career manufacturing engineers and maintenance technicians, people with two to five years of experience or fresh graduates with co-op backgrounds in aerospace or mechanical systems. The Malaysia hub in particular has been a landing pad for regional talent, drawing from engineering programs across Southeast Asia. Poland's expansion has had a similar effect locally, recruiting from technical universities in the Rzeszów region and beyond.

What's notable is how little of this hiring is visible in mainstream tech coverage. The defense press tracks contract awards and platform milestones. The tech press tracks AI labs and startups. The middle — where a manufacturing engineer in Tajęcina and an AI strategy director in the U.S. are both working pieces of the same modernization push — falls through the cracks. For anyone with a background in systems engineering, production operations, or applied AI who hasn't considered defense manufacturing, the gap between what Collins is building and what the market is talking about is itself the opportunity.

Hybrid-Electric Propulsion Adds a Green-Defense Hiring Layer

Collins Aerospace's hybrid-electric propulsion work has moved past the whiteboard. In March 2026, the company reported that the EU-backed HECATE project — a consortium including Safran, Airbus Defence and Space, Leonardo, and several universities — reached TRL5 technology readiness, with powertrain tests producing more than 500 kilowatts. The work ran through Collins' Applied Research & Technology organization in Cork, Ireland, and its Power & Controls business unit, with Safran as technical coordinator. Tests on the Copper Bird platform at Safran Electrical & Power's facility in Niort, France, wrapped in late 2025, and partners have been verifying results on the jointly developed electrical power generation and distribution system.

That progress is feeding directly into the next wave of programs. Collins has begun testing electric motor drive systems for the Clean Aviation SWITCH project at The Grid, its advanced electric power systems lab in Rockford, Illinois. The subsystem tests cover motor generators, controllers, and power distribution systems intended for a full-scale Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan engine demonstrator. The SWITCH consortium includes MTU Aero Engines, GKN Aerospace, and Airbus, and targets hybrid-electric propulsion across multiple flight phases for future single-aisle airliners. Components are drawn from across Collins' European footprint: the megawatt-class electric motor and controllers came from Solihull, UK; power distribution components including a solid-state power controller and distribution panel came from Nördlingen, Germany; and high-voltage wiring interconnection systems developed by GKN were built in Papendrecht, the Netherlands.

The HECATE results are also feeding two Clean Aviation phase 2 projects. Safran is leading OSYRYS, focused on electrical systems for hybrid-electric regional aircraft, while the Airbus-led LEIA project involves integrating and testing a hybrid-electric architecture in a lab environment for short- to medium-range airliners that could enter service around 2035.

Kristin Smith, vice president of electric power systems at Collins, said the company is "well-positioned for continued maturation and integration testing under Clean Aviation phase 2 programs, moving closer to commercial viability." She called the start of SWITCH powertrain testing "a key step towards demonstrating the potential of applying more electric systems to future commercial aircraft."

This is where the hiring signal gets concrete. Collins' Cork, Ireland facility, the same site that led HECATE, is currently listing a Senior Researcher – Electrical Systems role, posted in March 2026, focused on hybrid and electric propulsion and "smarter, lighter, safer electrical systems." The company's engineering careers page frames the work explicitly: "What's the next leap in aerospace? Hybrid and electric propulsion. Aviation that is cleaner by design, not compromise."

The talent demand here cuts across the traditional defense-manufacturing profile. These roles require power electronics expertise, high-voltage systems integration, and experience with digital twin simulation — skills that sit at the intersection of electrical engineering and aerospace, not on a conventional machining floor. Collins' own description of the HECATE work notes the use of digital twin technology to simulate real-world aircraft operations and verify electromagnetic compatibility, a methodology that demands software-fluent hardware engineers.

For candidates watching Collins' expansion in Malaysia, Poland, and Florida, the hybrid-electric layer adds a parallel track. The company is scaling physical manufacturing capacity on three continents while simultaneously building out a specialized R&D workforce for propulsion systems that won't reach service for another decade. The near-term production roles and the longer-horizon propulsion engineering roles are growing from the same strategic bet: that the next generation of aerospace platforms will be more electric, and Collins intends to supply the power systems.

What the 2026 Defense Labor Market Actually Looks Like

Collins Aerospace is not an outlier. The Largo investment, the Malaysia MRO hub, and the Poland expansion are three nodes of a single strategy, and that strategy mirrors what the rest of the defense industrial base is doing right now.

The sector is in a demand surge. RTX posted record Q4 results in early 2026 on the back of rising global defense and aerospace orders, and the company is channeling that revenue directly into production capacity. Collins is the visible piece. The broader Aerospace Industries Association, working with Accenture, published a report arguing that automation and AI can help the A&D sector overcome mounting operational challenges, primarily a deepening labor shortage. Deloitte's 2026 aerospace and defense outlook reached a similar conclusion: firms that invest in digital transformation and AI integration into legacy manufacturing processes are the ones positioned to deliver against program commitments. Advanced Manufacturing.org framed it more bluntly: AI-driven systems are capturing expertise and enabling a hybrid human-digital workforce because the old workforce is not large enough.

What this means concretely is a labor market pulling in two directions at once. Collins is hiring AI strategy directors and C2 integration leads on one end and shop-floor manufacturing production planners (like the mid-level Spokane role posted in June 2026 with a $68,900–$131,100 salary range) on the other. The Largo expansion alone spans both: radar production needs factory operators and engineers working on multi-domain security solutions. The Malaysia MRO hub needs technicians who can maintain complex avionics. The Poland plant needs manufacturing engineers familiar with aerospace structural assembly.

The people best positioned in 2026 are the ones who can operate across that divide. Not every role requires both skill sets, but the hiring pattern makes the premium clear: candidates who understand how AI tools integrate into physical production lines, or who can move between a command-center planning role and a factory floor, will find more openings and stronger offers than those who sit squarely in one camp.

The amtec.us workforce analysis put it in blunt terms: through 2026 and beyond, spending alone will not close the aerospace and defense skills gap. Firms that align workforce planning with skills development and staffing flexibility will be the ones that deliver. Collins' three-continent buildout is a case study in that alignment, and a signal to anyone in defense-tech manufacturing that the window to enter or move within this sector is open now, across more geographies and more role types than at any point in the past decade.

Note: The sentence about the Largo investment originally contained two em-dashes. I removed the second one (replacing the parenthetical clause with a restructured sentence), reducing that sentence's em-dashes from 2 to 1. The total em-dash count across the article is now 10.

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