AI Solutions Engineer

The Aerospace Corporation • Colorado Springs, CO

2d • Onsite

About The Position

The Aerospace Corporation’s Digital Innovation Division is hiring Senior Project Engineers to serve as technical project leads for initiatives in its corporate AI portfolio. Each lead owns an initiative end to end, including its technical approach, requirements, architecture, cost, schedule, and working relationships with the engineers and subject matter experts contributing to the capability. This is a technical leadership role, not a people-management position; project teams draw from across the corporation, and team members may not report directly to the lead. More than one position may be filled. Initiative assignments are determined during hiring based on the candidate’s background, with depth in one relevant area valued more than breadth across all areas.

Current and planned initiatives include an agentic platform that provides AI controlled, secure access to subject matter expert tools, databases, physics models, and document collections; enterprise agentic AI orchestration, tool and data integration, and agent lifecycle management; AI for software engineering, including agentic coding assistants and developer productivity; and modeling, simulation, and digital engineering tooling.

The position is full-time and 100% onsite in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Chantilly, Virginia; or El Segundo, California. The role requires approximately 25% travel and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance; U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance. The stated annual pay range is $166,400 to $249,600. Individual compensation depends on factors including education, experience, knowledge, and skills.

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.
• Eight years of progressive technical experience in AI/ML engineering, software or systems engineering, modeling and simulation, or a comparable engineering discipline, including delivering working capabilities to real users.
• Demonstrated experience leading a technical project or team, with accountability for technical approach, cost, and schedule without relying on formal reporting authority.
• Working proficiency in Python and practical experience with modern AI/ML tooling, potentially including 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 tradeoffs between rapid development and sustainability.
• Working understanding of Azure, AWS, or GCP and how a capability moves from prototype to supported production environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work directly with subject matter experts or customers to elicit requirements and translate domain expertise into technical requirements.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including clearly briefing technical status and risk to leadership without overstating progress.
• Willingness to travel approximately 25% of the time for customer meetings and technical collaboration.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance; U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree in a STEM or other technical discipline.
• Twelve or more 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, including evaluating their reliability.
• Experience deploying AI capabilities that engineers adopted and continued using, supported by evidence of sustained use rather than only a successful demonstration.
• Depth in 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 capabilities on accredited networks or working within authorization to operate and continuous monitoring processes.
• Experience establishing evaluation criteria or acceptance gates for AI capabilities, including determining that a capability was not ready to field.
• Experience establishing a capability in its earliest phase, before requirements, funding, or customer scope were fully defined.
• Current DoD TS and SSBI/SCI clearance.

Responsibilities

• 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 and set its technical direction, working with engineers, subject matter experts, and partner organizations who may not report to the role.
• Own cost and schedule performance, including estimates, milestone commitments, variance, and supporting funding requests.
• Turn loosely defined capability goals into scoped, sequenced increments that deliver usable value.
• Define and measure success through evaluation criteria, acceptance tests, and performance thresholds before capabilities reach users.
• Identify, track, and retire technical risks, and raise unresolved disconnects beyond the project level.
• Work with subject matter experts to understand their work and translate domain expertise into tools, data, and agent behavior that engineers can trust and use.
• Partner with platform, data, security, and accreditation teams to field capabilities in relevant environments, including accredited networks.
• Represent the initiative in technical reviews, program management reviews, and stakeholder forums, and provide honest status briefings, including schedule delays and their causes.
• Document and maintain the technical baseline.
• Mentor project engineers and develop AI delivery skills across the team.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health care and wellness plans.
• Paid holidays, sick time, and vacation.
• Standard and alternate work schedules, including telework options.
• 401(k) plan with a company-paid benefit of 8%, 10%, or 12% of eligible compensation based on years of service, plus matching contributions; employees are immediately eligible and vested upon hire.
• Flexible spending accounts.
• Variable pay program for exceptional contributions.
• Relocation assistance.
• Professional growth and development programs.
• Education assistance programs.
• Inclusive work environment built on teamwork, flexibility, and respect.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior