181 RTX Jobs Screen for 'TS/SCI' Before Skills or School

The Screen's First Question

RTX has open roles across its three divisions — Raytheon, Collins Aerospace, and Pratt & Whitney. A ClearedJobs.Net interview with an RTX recruiter noted Raytheon alone typically carries 50–100 open material program manager posts at any moment. The first cut of its hiring screen checks security clearance before a recruiter reads a word about your school.

The company renamed from Raytheon Technologies in July 2023. RTX now employs about 180,000 people (roughly the population of Syracuse, New York) and draws most of its sales from U.S. government contracts. Those federal dollars decide who gets hired: you need a clearance to touch the work. The contractor has paid export-violation fines and built missile radar in record time, proof of the weapons class that demands such checks.

Applicants enter data into RTX’s Workday system; recruiters report that clearance status is reviewed before skills. RTX’s contract work spans missiles, air defense, and satellites. Recruiters weight domain terms specific to each division’s technical vocabulary. A 2020 Defense News report on Raytheon raising a missile defense radar antenna in less than 120 days shows the kind of program those words map to.

Human recruiters then confirm the machine’s flags. RTX restructured in 2023 to line its businesses up with what customers (the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and commercial aviation) actually buy. They weigh domain terms against the clearance check. No clearance, no interview.

In a call with analysts in April 2023, RTX chief operating officer Christopher Calio said the restructuring is meant to “better align the company’s businesses with customer priorities” (Defense News), a line that explains why a division resume lives or dies on its own technical terms.

The screen’s bias reflects RTX’s contract mix, including the Navy’s $1.1 billion AIM-9X Block II missile contract RTX won June 26, 2026 (RTX's site), but across all divisions the rule holds: clearance first, then the division’s own technical verb. None of these screens reward prestige credentials; they filter on that sequence alone.

RTX’s career page urges candidates to bring “the brightest, most innovative minds across aviation, space and defense” (rtx.com). The application form, though, asks clearance status up front. The system logs that answer before a recruiter opens the file. Per Wikipedia, economist Clara Mattei writes that the company’s stock increased 77 percent from October 2023 to July 2025, and applicant volume lets gatekeepers trash any resume that fails the first scan.

The gatekeepers don’t want a well-rounded star. They want a cleared technician who spells “SPY-6” correctly — a federal badge no internal training can grant.

The Jobs Demand Clearance and Specific Jargon

Those three divisions formed after the 2020 merger of United Technologies and Raytheon Company. A ClearedJobs.Net interview with RTX recruiter Mike Barnum narrows the lens on Raytheon: he said that unit alone carries between 50 and 100 of those openings at any moment.

The same briefing named the functions RTX hunts most: cyber security pros, systems engineers, software engineers. Advanced manufacturing is a newer skill set, tied to a few-hundred-million-dollar factory in McKinney, Texas. Raytheon builds guided missiles, air defense systems, radar like Silent Night and over-the-horizon detection, plus hypersonics work dating back 15 to 20 years. Collins supplies avionics and aerostructures. Pratt & Whitney builds aircraft engines. RTX's Raytheon site describes the division creating next-generation solutions. The manufacturer also produces cybersecurity tools and drones.

Contract wins show where the technical depth goes. Raytheon secured a 2014 Air Force deal for the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar, worth about $1 billion, though the service later reevaluated after rival protests. More recent programs in the briefing include Stormbreaker smart weapons, Patriot surface-to-air contracts, and hypersonic defense. A $180 billion backlog (roughly a decade of production at current rates) explains why program management and engineering roles stay open continuously.

The federal government funds the bulk of RTX’s sales, and its products are weapons and surveillance systems. That makes eligibility not a bonus but a baseline for the technical core. The video repeats it: anyone in advanced manufacturing with a clearance gets pulled into new site work; if you have a clearance and passion, a fit appears sooner.

The table grounds the screen’s bias toward division-matched keywords. A resume that names a division’s flagship program hits its domain signal; the open posts demand both the function and the cleared status to even reach a human. The filter is the same across sister companies — only the dictionary changes.

RTX’s recruiter bench grew to match the load: the briefing said Raytheon’s talent acquisition staff jumped from 30–35 to over 200 after the merger. That team exists to process exactly these division-specific, clearance-gated requisitions. The open posts snapshot a machine built to place cleared engineers onto a backlog larger than the annual GDP of many states.

How Do You Beat the Filter?

Candidates chasing these posts have learned to rewrite applications so clearance and division keywords sit at the top. A PowerToFly interview with RTX talent acquisition's Amy Gardner shows the company’s own advice points the same way. She told applicants that preparation starts with the job description and the company as a whole.

"if you're able to take your resume and tailor it to the individual jobs that you're applying for you'll find that you're able to kind of highlight different things in different categories that will make it stand out to recruiters and hiring managers in different ways for various positions"

That guidance maps onto the open requisitions. Applicants drop generic degree lines and drop in the exact phrases from the posting, the same division-specific verbs the screen already weights. The automated filter scores matches, so the resume that mirrors the language wins the first cut.

Clearance is the harder gate. Many of these positions require active Secret or Top Secret eligibility. Candidates who hold a clearance write it in a header block, not buried in a certifications footer. Those awaiting adjudication state “TS/SCI pending” up front. The human screen then sees the credential in two seconds. A blank clearance line lands the file in the reject pile regardless of pedigree, because the screen prioritizes that signal over school name or past employer.

Networking closes the rest. The same recruiter called LinkedIn a friend and urged repeated outreach. Job seekers targeting Raytheon’s missile work connect with program managers and comment on division posts. They also read the news. RTX’s Raytheon unit won a $515 million SPY-6 radar deal on June 3, 2026 (RTX's site). Candidates walk into interviews with questions like “How will the AIM-9X production scale affect your operations?” (referencing the earlier Navy missile contract), showing homework and domain fit.

Interview execution follows the video’s playbook. A self-described nervous interviewer on the RTX channel recommended a note card with key resume topics to map answers quickly. Applicants bring that card to Zoom panels. After the meeting, they send thank-you notes. The recruiter said those notes are the best part of her day, whether email or handwritten, and told candidates to ask HR for missing contacts. That small step keeps the applicant in mind during final ranking.

RTX pitches a sense of purpose with warfighter impact. An employee in the PowerToFly video said the best part of liking the company was that any role from HR to engineering impacts the warfighter. Applicants echo that alignment instead of citing prestige schools. The recruiter also advised being yourself and not fearing curriculum gaps, because everyone has life breaks.

Practical moves for the openings start with mirroring the posting’s noun phrases exactly in your summary and skills sections. Put the clearance label in the header, not the footer. Connect with division staff on LinkedIn before submitting. Read the last two months of RTX division press releases for contract names. Send a thank-you note within 24 hours, via HR if you lack contacts. The candidate who treats the application as a matching exercise — mirroring the posting’s nouns, pinning clearance to the top, referencing a recent contract — turns the screen from a wall into a gate.

RTX’s hiring machine still opens on the same question it started with: cleared, and matched to the division’s own dictionary. Everything else is noise.

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