Aerospace Engineer Job Description

An Aerospace Engineer designs, analyzes and tests the machines that fly: airliners and business jets, helicopters, drones, electric air taxis, missiles, satellites and launch vehicles. The job sits where physics meets paperwork. Every wing spar, fuel line and flight-control law has to work, and the engineer has to prove it works in a form that a program manager, a customer and a regulator can check.

The occupation splits into specialties. ONET's sample of reported job titles for the occupation includes aerospace stress engineer, avionics engineer, flight controls engineer, flight systems test engineer and flight test engineer, which gives a fair map of the disciplines. An aerodynamicist runs computational fluid dynamics cases and correlates them with wind tunnel data. A stress engineer sizes structure against static, fatigue and damage-tolerance loads with finite element models. A propulsion engineer owns engine integration, inlets, nozzles and fuel systems. A guidance, navigation and control engineer writes and tunes the control laws, modeled in MATLAB and Simulink, two tools ONET lists for the occupation alongside CATIA, SolidWorks and Creo for design work.

On the transportation side of the field, certification is central to the job. Before a new aircraft design can be issued an airworthiness certificate, it generally has to complete the FAA's multistep design approval process, known as type certification. Engineers write the certification plan, map each airworthiness requirement to an analysis or a test, run the tests, and keep the drawings, specifications and data that define the approved design under tight configuration control. That last step matters on the factory floor: an aircraft conforms to its type certificate only when its configuration and installed components match the data in that certificate.

The work does not end at first delivery. Engineers at manufacturers, airlines and repair stations handle continued airworthiness: investigating in-service findings, writing repairs for damage outside the structural repair manual, approving alterations, and turning field data into service bulletins. Test engineers plan ground and flight campaigns, instrument the aircraft, and decide whether an anomaly in the data is a sensor glitch or a real problem.

The setting is less romantic than the hardware. BLS says aerospace engineers typically work in an office setting, often using a computer, and that most work full time, with some working more than 40 hours per week. Days are spent in models, design reviews and requirement documents, broken up by trips to a test cell, a hangar or a supplier's plant. The engineers who do well here combine strong analysis with a habit of writing down why each decision was made, because someone, years later, will need to know.

The entry ticket is a bachelor's degree in engineering or a related field, usually aerospace, aeronautical or mechanical engineering. BLS notes that some employers may prefer graduates of aerospace engineering programs accredited by a professional association, and that a degree from an accredited program is usually required to become licensed later. Coursework covers aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, flight mechanics, controls and materials, with heavy doses of calculus, differential equations and programming.

Some universities offer five-year programs that end in both a bachelor's and a master's degree. A graduate degree opens doors to research and development work and university teaching, and it helps for narrow specialties such as computational aerodynamics, structural dynamics or hypersonics. A doctorate makes sense mainly for research roles.

Experience before graduation counts. College students may join cooperative education programs or internships that put them inside a working engineering group. Student design-build-fly teams, rocketry clubs and CubeSat projects give a candidate something concrete to talk about in an interview: a requirement they had to meet, a test that failed, and what they changed.

Licenses and certifications. A license is not required for entry-level work. Experienced engineers may earn a Professional Engineer (PE) license, which lets them oversee other engineers' work, sign off on projects and offer services directly to the public. The usual path starts with the Fundamentals of Engineering exam from NCEES, followed by supervised experience and the PE exam, with the license itself issued by a state engineering licensing board. Systems engineers sometimes pursue INCOSE's Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP). Senior engineers in commercial aviation may be appointed by the FAA as Designated Engineering Representatives, who approve engineering data on the agency's behalf within a defined scope.

Skills that carry weight:

• Hand calculations solid enough to sanity-check any computer output
• CAD and product data management in tools such as CATIA, NX or Creo
• Finite element and CFD workflows, plus scripting in Python or MATLAB to automate them
• Requirements writing, verification matrices and configuration management
• Clear test reports and certification documents that a reviewer can follow without a meeting

As a rough guide, a new graduate spends the first two to four years doing analysis under a senior engineer's review, then takes ownership of a component or subsystem. Lead roles over a full system, or a delegated approval role with the FAA, often come after roughly eight to fifteen years. Moving between programs or disciplines along the way builds the breadth that chief engineer jobs require.

Projections for 2025-35

BLS counted 68,700 aerospace engineer jobs in 2025 and projects employment to grow 8 percent from 2025 to 2035, which it classes as much faster than the average for all occupations. BLS projects an employment change of 5,700 jobs over the decade. BLS expects about 3,800 openings a year on average, many of them from the need to replace engineers who move to other occupations or retire.

BLS ties the demand to a few concrete drivers. Aircraft are being redesigned for less noise pollution and better fuel efficiency. Technological advances have reduced the cost of launching satellites, and BLS expects demand to rise as space becomes more accessible, especially with small satellites that have greater commercial viability. Continued interest in drones for uses such as forest fire detection may also help drive employment growth.

Pay by setting

Industry matters for pay. In May 2025, aerospace engineers in aerospace product and parts manufacturing, which employed 25,900 of them, earned a median of $137,030. The transportation and warehousing sector employed only 1,750 aerospace engineers, at a median of $109,450, so engineers who want to stay close to airline and air-transport operations should expect a smaller job market in that sector.

Certification work for new aircraft

New aircraft types are creating certification work, but on the FAA's timeline. In a May 2026 report, GAO found that the FAA had not yet issued a type certification for a manned electric aircraft as of March 2026, and that when such aircraft can operate commercially is not clear. GAO also reported that the FAA is considering dedicated airworthiness standards for eVTOLs through a future rulemaking, informed by experience from current certification projects. For engineers on those programs, the work is showing compliance for battery, propulsion and flight-control designs that existing rules were not written for.

Supersonic transport is back on the regulatory agenda. The FAA's Fall 2026 Safety Briefing said a proposed rule published in July 2026 sets a noise-based certification standard for supersonic aircraft, that the agency planned a related landing and takeoff noise rule, and that it aims to finalize both rules by mid-2027. The ban on overland civil supersonic flight stays in place until the final rule publishes.

The regulator is itself an employer. The FAA's Aviation Safety organization employed 7,477 aviation professionals as of Jan. 10, 2026, and its FY 2026 workforce plan centers on aviation safety inspector and aviation safety engineer positions.

How AI is entering design work

Aerospace America reported in October 2026 that GE Aerospace used a generative AI tool to produce a preliminary design for a hypersonic ramjet engine within seconds, while saying it uses the technology only in early-stage design. Pooja Narayan, Airbus's fast track lead for artificial intelligence, told the magazine that the most promising design application is saving time, because simulations of a whole engine or aircraft "could be days to weeks sometimes." The same article reported that regulators typically require engineers to "show their working" and explain how every part is designed, a level of transparency current AI tools cannot provide.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am applying for the Structures Engineer II opening on your regional turboprop program. I have spent four years as a stress analyst at Northfield Aerostructures, where I size and substantiate fuselage frames, floor beams and door surrounds for a business jet fuselage that we build under contract.

Most of my work is static and fatigue analysis in finite element models, backed by hand calculations that I keep in the substantiation report so a checker can follow them. Last year I owned the analysis for a cargo door surround redesign after a supplier changed the extrusion alloy. I reran the fatigue and damage-tolerance cases, wrote the test plan for the coupon program, and walked our customer's certification team through the results. The redesign was approved without a resubmittal, and the test fixtures I specified are now used on two other parts.

I have also learned to work the gap between the model and the factory. When our line reported a repeated drilling mismatch on a splice, I traced it to a datum error in the drawing, issued the change, and updated the repair dispositions that had been written against the old geometry. That job taught me to treat configuration control as part of the engineering, not an afterthought.

Your program interests me because it is a clean-sheet airframe going through type certification, and I want to work on a design from conformity inspection through first flight. I hold a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering, passed the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, and I am working toward a Professional Engineer license. I am comfortable in CATIA and Nastran and I script my post-processing in Python.

I would welcome the chance to talk about how I can support your structures team.

Sincerely, Jordan Alvarez