How to get into defense tech jobs from commercial tech

Why are defense tech jobs suddenly open to commercial engineers?

Defense startups are hiring commercial engineers because they've stopped being research shops and started running factories. On October 6, 2026, Furientis — a Los Angeles company building low-cost, mass-producible missile interceptors — announced a $25 million seed round led by Benchmark, that firm's first pure defense investment, alongside its first funded government prototyping contract. The founders, Brody Franzen and Aris Simsarian, came out of Virgin Orbit and Castelion. The company says the money goes toward vertically integrated manufacturing, expanded flight testing, and engineering and manufacturing hiring in Los Angeles. That last clause is the one worth reading twice if you're sitting at a consumer software company wondering whether this door is actually open to you.

The thesis behind the round tells you what kind of engineer gets hired. Furientis points at a cost imbalance it says the 2024 Red Sea crisis exposed: multimillion-dollar interceptors fired at drones worth tens of thousands, with only a couple of hundred interceptors delivered a year. Its answer is to build ship-based interceptors more like cars — automotive-style materials and assembly, commercial off-the-shelf components, fast final assembly, and a target output measured in thousands per factory rather than hundreds. Solving that problem needs people who think in unit cost, tolerances, build rate and supplier lead times. It needs fewer people who think only in abstractions and sprint velocity.

Across the sector the pattern repeats, and it changes what your CV has to do. A defense or space manufacturer posts a far wider spread of distinct roles than a software startup of the same headcount: mechanical, firmware, controls, test, manufacturing and quality engineering, plus forward-deployed engineers who sit with operators. Mission alignment is an actual screen — recruiters at these companies filter out candidates who are "open to anything." And before anyone forms an opinion about your code, your file has to clear a compliance question and, at many primes, an older and less forgiving parser than the one your last employer used.

Where should citizenship and security clearance go on your resume?

Put citizenship and clearance on a dedicated line near the top of page one, directly beneath your contact details or your opening summary — never tucked in beside interests at the bottom. A defense recruiter's first task isn't judging your engineering; it's confirming you're legally allowed to touch the work. Make that take two seconds. Be specific: "Active U.S. Secret clearance, investigation completed March 2024," or "U.S. citizen — no clearance, eligible to obtain." Vague phrasing gets read as a no. If you'd rather keep details off a document that may circulate widely, "U.S. security clearance — details on request" works for a direct application, though it slows your file down.

Learn to decode the posting language, because the three common phrasings mean three different things. "Active TS/SCI required" is immediate and non-negotiable; nobody is going to wait for you. "U.S. citizenship required" as a standalone line usually signals export-controlled technical data rather than classified work. "Ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance" means you must already be eligible — citizen or lawful permanent resident — and is not an offer of visa sponsorship. Green card holders count as U.S. persons for export-control purposes, which opens ITAR-controlled roles, but clearances themselves are granted to citizens as a general rule.

Here's the contrarian part: don't delay your search trying to get cleared first. You can't sponsor your own clearance — an employer with a facility clearance and a contractual need has to initiate it, so "I'll apply once I have a Secret" is a plan that never starts. Apply uncleared, say you're eligible, and accept that you may spend your first six to twelve months on unclassified work while the paperwork runs. Also keep clearance specifics off your public LinkedIn profile and public job boards; list level, investigation date and polygraph status only on CVs you send directly to a defense employer.

How do you write about past projects without breaking ITAR or an NDA?

Write every bullet so you'd be comfortable reading it aloud in a crowded café. That's the working test for an ITAR-safe CV: describe your role, discipline, scope and outcome, and leave out performance parameters, capabilities and anything that identifies a controlled design. Export rules treat technical data shared with a foreign person as an export even when nothing crosses a border, and a CV sitting on a public job board is a realistic way that happens. Program nicknames and the two- and three-letter compartment code words don't belong on a resume or an application form, no matter how much they'd impress the right reader.

The phrasing patterns that survive review are straightforward once you've seen them. Name the customer generically — "DoD customer," "federal client," "intelligence community program" — rather than the agency. Describe the work by discipline: "led thermal analysis for a classified airborne platform," or "developed signal-processing software for a classified mission application." Swap absolute numbers for scoped ones: team size, budget band, schedule recovered, percentage improvement, number of deliverables, and the lifecycle phase you owned (requirements, PDR, CDR, integration, qualification test). Close the section with one honest line: "Further detail available in an appropriately cleared setting." Then have your security or export-control officer read it before it goes anywhere public.

If you're coming from commercial tech, you have the opposite problem and should exploit it. You can describe nearly everything you've built, so be relentlessly specific where cleared candidates can't be — name the sensor, the protocol, the failure you root-caused at 3 a.m., the units you shipped. Three substantial open-source projects, a published paper, or a patent will outperform a page of vague duty statements. Then make sure the whole file parses: many defense employers run older applicant tracking systems, so a single-column layout with real headings beats a designed template with text boxes, icons and sidebars that quietly drop half your experience.

Which defense keywords matter more than your framework names?

In defense hiring, the words that move your file forward are standards, interfaces and physical nouns — not the JavaScript framework you shipped last quarter. Systems-level languages are the baseline: C++ and Rust for autonomy and embedded work, Python for tooling and ML, with real-time and safety-critical experience treated as a genuine differentiator. Around that sit the terms a parser is actually configured to find: ROS2, hardware-in-the-loop, embedded Linux, GD&T and tolerance stack-up, FEA, MIL-STD-810 and MIL-STD-461 qualification, AS9100, DO-178C and DO-254, first article inspection, FMEA, root cause analysis, V&V, ITAR and export control, and on the cyber side CMMC and NIST 800-171.

The move is translation, not invention. You don't claim missile experience you don't have — you re-describe what you did in the vocabulary of the people reading. Running on-call for a service that couldn't go down is integration and sustainment under operational pressure. Driving cloud spend down is unit cost reduction at volume, which is the entire premise of the low-cost interceptor thesis. Shipping a consumer hardware accessory means you've been through design, tooling, qualification and a supplier who missed a date. Say it that way, with the number attached, and a hardware hiring manager recognises a peer rather than a tourist.

Two cautions. First, keyword lists don't work unsupported — every term you claim should appear inside a bullet with a result, because defense recruiters are trained to look for the outcome line and read a number-free bullet as a job description. Second, tailor per employer; different companies weight different standards, so a single generic CV underperforms everywhere. Paste the actual job ad into a free AI CV analysis and you'll get the missing-skills list for that posting plus ATS-friendly rewrites in six templates that mirror its wording. For LinkedIn or Indeed ads, paste the text rather than the link — those sites block fetching.

How do you prove the pivot is real rather than opportunistic?

Show mission intent in writing and back it with something you built. Defense startups screen for people who actively want this work, and they discard candidates who read as sector-curious — so a two-line positioning statement at the top of your CV does real work: what you build, why defense, and what you want to own next. "Embedded engineer, eight years in automotive braking controls; moving to defense to work on systems that have to function the first time, in the field, at volume." That's a position. "Passionate technologist seeking new challenges" tells a recruiter nothing and signals that you're applying everywhere.

Then make the claim verifiable. Build something physical and write it up: a flight controller you wrote firmware for, an FPV drone with a logged autonomy stack, a sensor fusion project with real data and real failures. Read the public material on the programs a company supports so you can hold a conversation about operational constraints instead of features. If a role sits behind a clearance you don't have, target the classification-agnostic work first — internal platforms, developer tooling, test automation, manufacturing execution — because the clearance requirement attaches to specific programs and data, not to the whole company. Those teams hire faster and move you inside the building.

Set realistic expectations on the clock. Budget three to six months of focused applying, plus six to twelve months of unclassified work if an employer sponsors your clearance, so a full transition commonly runs a year from first application to cleared project. Pay is competitive — these companies deliberately recruit against big tech with equity-weighted packages — but the interview bar is high on systems fundamentals and ownership. If your CV still reads like a web developer's, rebuild rather than append: a CV review built for career changers surfaces the transferable work you're underselling, and the chat-based CV builder rewrites the whole file around the role you want.

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