Colorado Springs Has Over 1,000 Electronic Warfare Job Openings — and The Aerospace Corporation Just Added Five More at $234,000

A Sudden Cluster of Hard-to-Fill Roles

The Aerospace Corporation added 35 roles to its careers board in the past week. Five sit squarely in spectrum warfare or multi-domain sensing, a concentration that would be unusual for an FFRDC with 4,600 employees across 26 locations unless something specific were driving it.

The titles tell the story.

Each maps to a named Air Force Research Laboratory program area: spectrum warfare, multi-domain sensing autonomy, and sensor integration.

The job descriptions make the AFRL connection explicit. The Systems Director role for Spectrum Warfare Analysis and Design (posted on BuiltIn and Glassdoor before being pulled in May 2025) required the hire to "support the SWAC Spectrum Warfare Program Director in the development of the US Space Force design for Spectrum Warfare capabilities, including Space Data Transport, Ground Data Transport and PNT." SWAC is the space warfighting analysis center the Space Force's force-design shop. The posting demanded 12 years of professional experience, at least 10 in national security space, and a current Top Secret/SSBI/SCI clearance. The position was 100% onsite in classified facilities in Colorado Springs.

AFRL's own hiring confirms the demand signal runs both ways. The lab's Sensors Directorate posted openings for a Sensing Autonomy Technical Area Lead (AFRL/RYA) and an ISR Mission Autonomy Technology Lead in Dayton, Ohio, both in the Multi-Domain Sensing Autonomy Division. AFRL's Spectrum Warfare Division (AFRL/RYW) lists its core technology areas as "radio frequency and electro-optical sensing, electromagnetic spectrum warfare, multi-domain sensing autonomy, resilient mission systems, and enabling devices and components," almost exactly the competency set The Aerospace Corporation's postings describe.

As a federally funded research and development center, Aerospace doesn't compete for contracts the way Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman do. It sits inside the problem, providing analysis-based decision support to program offices. When it posts a role tied to a specific AFRL division or Space Force center, that role fills a funded, named requirement — not a speculative bet.

Why Spectrum Warfare Is the Next Great Power Battleground

GPS jamming in Ukraine and Chinese advances in electronic warfare have exposed how dependent U.S. military systems are on satellite-based navigation and unhindered spectrum access. AFRL's Spectrum Warfare Division exists to close that gap, researching, developing, and transitioning technologies that keep air platforms mission-capable in contested and denied electromagnetic environments.

The Sensors Directorate, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, organizes its work across six technology areas: electromagnetic spectrum warfare, multi-domain sensemaking, photonics sensing, autonomy, microelectronics, and electro-optical/infrared sensing. FY23 core funding was $330 million, with total executed funding reaching $845 million when collaborator contributions and congressional adds are included, per the Sensors Directorate's own overview. That money funds research into everything from low-cost RF sensors and advanced digital arrays to AI-driven automatic target recognition and cognitive sensing.

Adversaries have invested heavily in denying U.S. forces access to the electromagnetic spectrum, jamming GPS signals, spoofing navigation systems, and targeting the RF links that connect sensors to shooters. AFRL's response is to build systems that can sense, decide, and act inside that contested environment rather than relying on permissive conditions. The division's stated mission is to "enable mission assurance in contested and denied environments against threats that exploit the EM spectrum."

That mission now extends to autonomous systems. AFRL issued a request for information on the Joint Multi-INT Precision Reference (JMPR), a program designed to give drone swarms sub-nanosecond timing accuracy using next-generation atomic clocks. The goal is a decentralized positioning, navigation, and timing architecture where unmanned systems generate local timing references and synchronize with nearby aircraft, no GPS required. The program targets swarms ranging from a few platforms to several hundred, with strict size, weight, and power constraints for small airframes, per an i-HLS report on the RFI.

Precision-timed drone swarms could share sensor data, coordinate targeting, and distribute intelligence in real time even under heavy electronic attack. Without that capability, individual platforms lose coordination the moment satellite navigation degrades. The JMPR effort reflects a broader shift across the Department of Defense: the 2020 DoD Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy formally moved away from treating electronic warfare as a separable function and toward unified Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, recognizing that spectrum dominance is now a prerequisite for every other warfighting domain.

For engineers, this means demand for spectrum-warfare expertise is not a niche — it's becoming foundational to how the Air Force and Space Force design every sensing and communications system that has to survive contact.

Aerospace Becomes the Bridge Between Lab and Orbit

The Aerospace Corporation occupies a position no other private entity can. As an FFRDC, it has spent six decades testing spacecraft, diagnosing failures, and advising the government on problems spanning the entire space enterprise. Now that role is expanding. The corporation is leveraging its data advantage and technical depth to become the connective tissue between AFRL research and the operational military systems that need to work on orbit.

Tanya Pemberton, Aerospace's CEO and president, said the corporation holds data that cuts across the private sector, testing data from every program it has supported, operational data from government missions, and failure analysis going back decades. "We are a trusted entity," she said in an interview with SpaceNews. "We know how to handle the data appropriately." That trust underpins a new initiative called government-furnished talent, which gives companies (especially new entrants) access to Aerospace's technical staff and infrastructure. The model mirrors government-furnished equipment: the FFRDC opens its labs, domain expertise, and institutional knowledge to firms that might otherwise build systems without understanding the radiation environment of space or the failure modes that have killed satellites for 65 years.

The practical effect is that Aerospace is no longer just a test house or an advisor. It is becoming an active bridge between the government's research arm and the companies building the next generation of military space systems. The Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, and NASA all rely on Aerospace to identify evolving threats, evaluate new technologies, and serve as a link to the commercial sector. When AFRL develops a new sensor concept or a new approach to spectrum warfare, Aerospace is the organization that helps determine whether it can survive in orbit — and whether a commercial vendor can build it at scale.

The stakes of getting it wrong are rising. The Space Force's Resilient Missile Warning/Missile Tracking program in medium Earth orbit showed how quickly programs can run into trouble. RTX was cut from the Epoch 1 effort in June 2024 after cost growth, schedule slips, and unresolved design challenges forced Space Systems Command to terminate its contract, per Breaking Defense. Millennium Space Systems picked up a follow-on production contract worth roughly $500 million for six satellites. The episode underscored what Aerospace has long argued: the space environment is unforgiving, and once a satellite launches, the government lives with whatever it got. The corporation's testing infrastructure (more than 150 specialized labs, including tribology labs that understand how bearings and lubricants behave in vacuum) exists precisely to catch those problems before they become orbital failures.

Why Colorado Springs — and Not Somewhere Else

The spectrum-warfare and multi-domain sensing roles aren't scattered across the country. They're concentrated in one city. Both of those senior technical leader postings list Colorado Springs as the primary work location, full-time, on-site. That's not a coincidence.

Colorado Springs already hosts the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, the unit these roles directly support. It's also home to NORAD, U.S. Space Command, Space Systems Command, and AFRL's Space Vehicles Directorate. Aerospace's facility there sits inside a dense cluster of organizations that all need engineers who understand how to sense, process, and act across domains: space, air, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum.

LinkedIn shows over 1,000 electronic warfare positions in the city. Indeed lists 1,168 defense jobs. Glassdoor has 475 defense engineering roles. MITRE, which runs its own FFRDC supporting the Defense Department, is also hiring an RF Spectrum Engineer, Lead in Colorado Springs. Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and L3Harris all have systems engineering and chief engineer roles posted there with similar domain focus.

What makes Colorado Springs different from Washington, D.C. for policy, Huntsville for missiles, or Los Angeles for satellite manufacturing is that it's where the operational commands and the analytical organizations sit side by side. Engineers there don't just design systems. They sit in the same rooms where those systems get force-structured, mission-tested, and handed to warfighters. For multi-domain sensing work, where the gap between a good sensor and a useful kill chain is measured in organizational integration as much as in decibels, that proximity matters.

The Actual Skills Behind the Postings

Strip away the job titles and a pattern emerges. The current openings read less like a traditional defense contractor's wish list and more like a blueprint for the systems the military actually needs to build.

RF sensing and electromagnetic-spectrum analysis sit at the core. The Spectrum Warfare Senior Technical Leader role signals a need for people who can design systems that don't just detect signals but interpret and act on them in contested spectrum environments, sensing, classifying, and responding to adversarial emissions in real time across frequency bands that are increasingly jammed, spoofed, and congested.

EO/IR sensor fusion is the other half. The Multi domain sensing senior technical leader role points to demand for such engineers, people who can merge data from disparate sensor types into a single coherent picture. The military's problem isn't a shortage of sensors; it's that radar, infrared, and optical systems still largely operate in separate pipelines.

Spectrum autonomy ties those threads together. Taken as a group, the job descriptions suggest Aerospace is looking for engineers who can build systems that make decisions about spectrum use without human-in-the-loop delays, adapting waveforms, rerouting sensor tasking, and reallocating bandwidth on the fly. That requires a blend of signal processing, machine learning, and real-time systems engineering that's genuinely rare.

Resilient mission systems architecture rounds out the picture. The El Segundo roles point to a parallel requirement: engineers whose systems degrade gracefully under attack rather than fail catastrophically.

The salary spread is notable. The Colorado Springs and Chantilly roles, closest to AFRL and the operational commands, top out near $234,000. The El Segundo roles sit lower. That gap likely reflects both cost-of-labor differences and the premium the corporation places on proximity to the research-to-operations pipeline.

A National Restructuring Hiding in Plain Sight

The Aerospace Corporation's hiring surge is a local signal of a national shift. The defense industrial base is moving (slowly, unevenly) away from the hardware-centric, prime-contractor-dominated model that has defined it since the 1993 "Last Supper" consolidation, toward something more software-defined, spectrum-agile, and dependent on a broader commercial talent pool.

After the Cold War, the number of U.S. aerospace and defense prime contractors fell from more than 50 to roughly six, per a Center for a New American Security report. That consolidation made sense when the U.S. faced no near-peer adversary. It does not make sense now. The Defense Science Board's February 2025 report put it bluntly: the legacy industrial base cannot surge development, production, or training on a timescale relevant to a peer conflict. China's manufacturing base is more than three times the size of America's, per the White House's 2026 Economic Report of the President. Its five largest defense firms have nearly 50% more total revenue than the six largest U.S. firms, because those Chinese companies operate across both commercial and military markets, a structural advantage the U.S. primes, as pure-play defense enterprises, do not have, per the DSB report.

Today, 60% of DoD spending on major weapon systems goes to pure defense specialists, per the White House ERP 2026. Before the Last Supper, commercial firms doing both defense and civilian work received roughly two-thirds of that spending. Only half of DoD contract dollars are awarded through competitive bids. Prime contractors' patents are now less influential (as measured by forward citations) than those of other firms, a reversal from the Cold War era.

Software-defined warfare is pulling in new talent. The Atlantic Council's Commission on Software-Defined Warfare defines the concept as the continuous integration of interoperable software into both legacy and future defense systems, a software-centric, hardware-enabled approach to warfighting. Aerospace's own postings reflect it: roles like Software Systems Architect and Combat Power Systems Engineering Lead sit alongside the more traditional spectrum-warfare and multi-domain-sensing positions, and they pay in the same range.

The skills required for software-defined warfare do not map neatly onto the traditional defense workforce. RF sensing, EO/IR fusion, spectrum autonomy, and resilient mission systems all require engineers who can work across the electromagnetic spectrum as a programmable domain, not just design hardware that operates within it. The talent pool for this work lives as much in commercial wireless, semiconductor, and AI companies as in the legacy defense primes.

The Defense Innovation Unit has invested more than $1.7 billion across over 100 companies since 2015, with 87% of awardees classified as non-traditional providers and 80% as small commercial businesses, per the DSB report. But DIU has consistently struggled to transition those capabilities to the warfighter at scale. Executive Order 14265, signed in April 2025, calls for a comprehensive overhaul of defense acquisition with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and execution. Whether that order produces structural change or another round of compliance theater is the open question.

The direction of travel is clear. The U.S. military is trying to build a software-defined, spectrum-agile force, and it cannot do that with the workforce or the industrial base it had in 2005. Engineers who can bridge that gap will find no shortage of demand, but the institutional barriers are real. Security clearances take months. Export controls constrain hiring. The Foreign Military Sales backlog has left Taiwan with $19 billion in undelivered paid orders, per the CNAS report. The pay is competitive, the work is hard, and the window is open now.

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