Category: Industry Insights

The primes have a promotion problem, and it’s about to become your hiring advantage. In space, experience is hard to come by, but ability is everywhere. Plenty of engineers can already do the job. It’s just that their resume doesn’t say so yet. The answer to that gap: the step-up hire. 

What Is a Step-Up Hire? 

You’ve got a spot for a senior engineer. And somewhere inside a bigger company, with fewer opportunities, the engineer you need has been ready for a while. They’re the ones junior engineers go to for advice before anyone else. They’re doing jobs no one assigned to them, like running the subsystem review, or catching a design flaw before it ever reaches a senior engineer’s desk. The step-up hire is the person you might overlook for a role because “senior” is not in their job title yet. That’s the person you need to hire. 

There Aren’t Enough Engineers to Begin With 

There aren’t enough engineers in this industry to begin with, let alone senior engineers who’ve seen a program from requirements through operations. That’s only one of the reasons that 95% of space companies report skills-related recruitment or retention challenges.

The average recruitment cycle takes about 10 weeks. That’s 10 weeks of work lost to recruitment. The skills shortage shows up the most in propulsion, avionics, and flight software, the disciplines with the fewest people who’ve carried a full program end to end.

Why Engineers Are Leaving for Commercial Tech

And turnover isn’t helping either. The engineers don’t always leave because they’re frustrated where they are. The space industry is also competing for talent with the commercial tech industry for aerospace-trained engineers by offering them more money and faster progression.

The Primes’ Promotion Ceiling is Your Opportunity

Finding and retaining engineers for the space industry is about knowing what makes them tick. Progression is one thing most engineers are looking for at a certain point. Larger companies, especially the primes, can’t always offer engineers their next step once they’re ready. A team of five or six engineers might only have room for one of them to move up. That means most of these engineers will have to either stay put and try again next year or think of moving elsewhere. 

A Senior at a Prime Isn’t a Senior at a Startup 

In our experience, a senior at a prime is not the same as a senior at a startup. Primes and startups both have their own challenges and advantages, and no company is perfect. It just depends on what you’re looking for as an engineer. 

Primes offer higher salaries and the career stability that startups can’t always promise. But there’s often a lot of red tape to deal with, and progression can be slow. A startup can offer a role that often doesn’t exist for engineers working inside a prime: hands-on technical leadership from day one, and a promotion timeline tied to how fast the company grows instead of how many seats are free in the org chart.

Management Track VS Staying Technical

Most engineers want responsibility and accountability. For ambitious engineers who love the tech, frustrations could start to build at the primes. 

People management and staying technical are two different paths when it comes to larger space companies. At a prime, leading a team often means signing off on someone else’s test plan, instead of running the test bench yourself. 

The Job Description Trap to Avoid

At EVONA, we often see founders responding to a difficult talent market by adding more things to the job description. The logic is something like “If the skills are hard to find, let me try to get more skills in one person”. Instead of helping, this costs you candidates.

The people who could fill your jobs are out there. They just might be waiting for their big break at a larger space company. This looks like standard engineers ready for senior, seniors ready for principal or lead.

How to Hire a Step-Up Candidate in Space Engineering

You might not be able to offer a prime salary but you can offer engineers something they won’t get at the primes: faster growth, while staying close to the tech they love. The step up is the offer.

The best way to approach this is to write the job description one level below where you’d naturally aim, and say so in the posting. In practice, that can mean rewriting the posting itself: describe the role as one for someone ready to become a Senior Systems Engineer, with the day-one expectations spelled out for the first two quarters.

Sell the Ownership

Your job description is your pitch to the engineers you’re interviewing. Instead of focusing on years of experience in the job, tell a candidate exactly what they’ll own in the first six months. Lead with the scope of the role, and not just the compensation, because ownership is the thing they won’t get by staying where they are. 

Most founders already know they can’t outbid a prime on salary, but an offer isn’t only about money and the trimmings. It’s also about the opportunity to grow and the exposure to helping build a company – and the tech – from the ground up. 

Don’t Forget to Screen for Culture

Screen for the transition instead of the years. Look for fast-paced or chaotic project work, side projects that show real interest in the industry, and evidence someone can operate without a structure telling them what to do next. Ten years at one company only matters if the instincts for a startup aren’t there too.

That step up works best with support around it. Pair the promotion with someone who’s done the role before, even if that’s a fractional advisor or a former colleague brought in for a few hours a month. The jump is real. It doesn’t have to be solo.

Every recruiter working the space market right now sees the same thing: strong candidates are getting multiple offers within days, not weeks. The founders who move first on the step-up pitch are the ones filling roles while everyone else is still waiting for a résumé that was never going to show up. The step-up candidates are already out there, waiting on a job description that actually speaks to them. See what EVONA can find for you.

If you want to grow a successful space startup, you need to hire like you mean it. Who you hire, and how, will determine your success. The space companies that make it from seed to IPO change tactics at every stage based on the challenge before them.

Every stage tests something different. Seed asks if you can build the thing at all. Series A asks if what you built has legs to scale. Finally, Series B asks if you can grow faster than everyone else on the same mission. Hiring for the stage you’re at builds proof. Are you hiring for proof, or hiring to fill a gap? 

Is Your Hiring Model Changing With You?

We’ve worked with clients from their first seed round through to a public listing. No two companies followed the same path, but all of them kept adapting their hiring to whatever problem the stage brought.

A pre-seed founder and a Series C founder are solving the same underlying problem. They need the right people for the job, but under very different constraints. One is protecting eighteen to twenty-four months of cash. The other is banking on a board’s confidence in how fast they can execute.

Sticking to the same hiring plan at every stage could lead to either spending money you don’t have early on, or moving too slowly once the company is scaling. Space companies looking to scale fast need to rethink their hiring approach every few months by asking themselves: “Does the model match the moment?”

Pre-Seed and Seed: Fractional Leadership Without the Commitment

At seed stage, few companies can justify a full-time CFO, COO, or Head of Ops, even though they can’t do without the expertise. This is where fractional leadership saves the day. That means a part-time CFO who’s raised capital before, or a fractional COO who’s already dealt with the kind of problem most first-time space founders haven’t: export control. 

Many space startups only discover their ITAR obligations once they try to hire a foreign national engineer, and the penalties for getting it wrong run up to $1 million per violation. With fractional hires, you’ll get experienced judgment for a few hours a week instead of a full salary.

We see founders bring in fractional operators with a plan to convert them to a full-time hire once they can justify it. It’s also why we built Fraction, our platform connecting founders with fractional executives across deep tech, defense, and space, so you can find the right senior expertise regardless of who happens to be in your network.

Fresh Off the Round: Spend Investor Money Wisely

The weeks after you close a round are when the math matters most. Hire someone permanent before you’re sure you need them, and you’re spending your investor’s money on a guess. Space hardware roles are especially expensive guesses: a senior propulsion or avionics hire can cost $200,000 to $300,000 once you include salary, benefits, and overhead.

This is where contract hiring can help. We’re seeing more founders bring in a contractor first. We’ll handle the payroll, so you don’t have to commit to a huge cost yet. It buys the company time to find out if the role really makes sense. If it does, the contract then converts to a permanent hire. 

Series A to B: Hiring for Good vs. Staying Flexible 

As you move through Series A and into B, the test is about whether you can scale what you built, reliably. As you start scaling, it becomes clear which roles you can’t live without. Those roles are worth hiring for directly, through a focused, headhunter-led search. But that doesn’t solve the volume problem you’ll be sitting with at this point. 

With multiple open roles at once, even a strong internal recruiter runs out of hours in the day. In space, that volume problem usually comes off the back of a big government contract win. SpaceX alone has picked up more than $7 billion in Pentagon contracts this year. 

On a startup’s scale, landing even one contract can turn a handful of open roles into a full team almost overnight. That’s why we embed directly into your team, working as part of your in-house hiring effort. That means your hiring capacity grows with demand, saving the cost of a permanent hiring team.

Series C and Beyond: When Diligence Matters More Than Speed

By the time you’re closing later rounds or approaching IPO, the hires that matter most are senior, and getting one wrong costs more than a missed engineering deadline. This year’s SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, is already pulling a new wave of space companies toward the same milestone. 

The test isn’t about growth anymore. It’s whether your leadership can hold up under scrutiny. A bad C-suite hire costs a board’s confidence and months of momentum you don’t get back. This is where Executive Search comes in: partner-led searches based on deep research, and built to get the decision right the first time.

The Takeaway

None of these approaches should be used without considering where you’re at. The hiring model needs to match the moment you’re in. If you’re not sure where your own hiring maturity sits right now, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we have with founders every week. Get in touch and we’ll help you figure it out.

In space, retaining the skills you need often means a cross-country search. It also often means asking an engineer to relocate to bring your mission to life. Asking someone to relocate for a role is asking them to uproot their life, and their family too. That’s not a decision most people make on a recruiter’s word alone.

We’ve written to candidates directly about what they need to consider before relocating for a role. Founders can do a lot to help prospective candidates say yes to their offer. Here’s what you need to know about a relocation offer in space.

Is Relocation Really Necessary?

Because space talent is geographically clustered around the country, local talent often won’t cut it. Avionics and propulsion-test work has to be in person, so if you’re not based in Huntsville or the Golden Corridor, there’s no way around it. Even when talent is available locally, the market is competitive enough that you may still need to look elsewhere.

Remote work isn’t an option in space the way it is at software companies. More than 80% of the roles we place at EVONA require some sort of on-site presence, and for electrical engineers, that number climbs past 90%. By definition, roles that require clearance can’t be done remotely, and a lot of hardware work has to happen where the hardware is.

The engineers who will get you to Series B aren’t just choosing a job. They’re choosing a life. If they have a spouse, signing your offer may impact their partner’s career too. If they have kids, their schooling will be impacted. Making a hire like this means winning their family’s buy-in, and that’s where the founder’s role in a relocation offer comes in.

The Recruiter Closes, the Founder Seals the Deal

In space startups, the founder plays an important role in getting engineers to buy into their vision, especially when it may require them to move. The recruiter identifies and headhunts the talent, presents your story and vision, negotiates the numbers, and stress-tests whether the engineer is really ready to move. Once that’s done, the founder makes the mission real.

How We Support Engineers to Relocate

Before an offer goes out, our job is to make sure nothing about the move is unresolved, so engineers can make an informed, confident decision.

Even before the first interview, we start asking prospective hires the hard questions they may otherwise avoid. That way, founders have the best chance of the engineer they liked signing on the dotted line, and sticking around long after.

This also lowers the chances that a newly appointed hire will reconsider after a counteroffer. We’ve seen a candidate walk away after already relocating and starting on-site, only to have a former employer come back with a strong enough counteroffer to change their mind. Surfacing hesitations before an offer goes out is what prevents that.

One of the most important questions we ask is: “Has your partner agreed to the move?” That’s because being “open to a move” is not the same as seriously considering the real-life implications.

We test for it rather than take their word for it. That’s not because we don’t trust them, but because the more engineers can consider the cost to their livelihoods upfront, the better prepared they will be when an offer comes. Beyond checking whether their family is on board, we run through a series of logistical considerations, including schools, notice periods, and housing. We only send an offer letter once we’re confident the candidate has thought through everything.

Where the Founder Comes In

With so much at stake, a founder’s involvement in the interview process is often what seals the deal. The recruiter sells and presents the role, but a recruiter can’t credibly sell the company’s future, because they don’t own it. Only you can speak with real authority on where the company is headed, what the candidate would actually get to work on, and why the mission is worth the disruption to their life, and that conversation has a bigger impact on engineers than a pitch from a recruiter ever could.

We tell candidates considering an early-stage relocation to ask the founder directly about the runway. Having a real number ready is key. A vague answer here is one of the fastest ways to lose someone who’s weighing a real risk.

Support for the spouse’s side of the move matters here too, even something as simple as a warm introduction to a local team or pointing toward relocation resources. It shows the company sees this as a family decision, and candidates appreciate that.

What a Relocation Offer Accounts For

The Money

We also advise founders on how to make a relocation offer appealing. Because relocation touches most of the roles you’re hiring for, the costs are worth planning for before the first search even starts.

Check the offer number against the reality of the city your prospective hire is moving to. A cost-of-living calculator is a great tool for this. A salary that looks identical on paper can be a pay cut in a new city.

After calculating the cost-of-living gap, here’s what you should include to make a relocation offer worthwhile:

• a cost-of-living adjustment
• moving expenses
• temporary housing
• a house-hunting trip

This way, the number on the offer letter looks good in practice and not just on paper.

The Time

Moving a family takes time. It could involve anything from a spouse’s job search to selling a house. For relocation offers, founders need to factor a delayed start date into their runway.

We help by mapping the notice period, visa processing (if applicable), and moving logistics against the start date. Founders who are flexible about the start date have access to engineers worth the wait.

The Takeaway

A recruiter closes the candidate. But a candidate who relocates is likely choosing your company for years. And that decision will ultimately get made around a kitchen table, not in an interview room. The startups that successfully navigate relocation offers aren’t always the ones offering the biggest relocation package. They’re the ones where the founder gets in front of the candidate early, making an indisputable case for the mission.

Building a relocation offer for your next hire? EVONA’s recruiters have walked hundreds of space engineers through this exact decision, and we can help you get ahead of the questions that decide whether they say yes. Find more on hiring in space at EVONA Insights.

You didn’t build a space company for your lead engineer to sit in interviews all day. The obvious cost of a slow hiring process is the fee, the job board spend, the weeks on the calendar. The real cost is the opportunity cost: the person who should be building your proof of concept is sitting across a table instead. 

You need a specialist in space recruitment. Here’s why:

Specialists vs. Generalist Recruiters

Hiring for technical know-how in space is much harder than technical recruiting in other industries, and your TA team will feel it. The average space-sector role takes about 10 weeks to fill, per the UK Space Sector Skills Survey 2023. And it’s not getting any easier. Working with specialists dedicated to the space industry can bring that down. At Evona, we’ve brought that figure down to 6 weeks.

Internal teams are generalist by necessity because most early-stage companies can’t justify more than one or two internal recruiters. Their priority is whatever’s open that week: engineering today, finance next month, ops after that.

Compare that to a specialist desk in the space industry. They do one thing, all day: recruit for space. They’ve spent years building a pool of passive talent ready to pick up their call. A recruiter working across multiple disciplines doesn’t have the bandwidth to build deep networks. They work reactively instead, starting from scratch with every new role. That costs time, and by extension money, that space companies can’t afford to lose.

Technical Vocabulary

Judging how well someone understands propulsion systems or AIT work is the engineer’s job, not a recruiter’s. That’s true no matter who’s in charge of the search. A generalist recruiter running a propulsion search might not know what an AIT engineer does, or why satellite integration experience doesn’t mean someone can build a satellite from scratch.

And without the technical vocabulary to know a weaker candidate from a stronger one, your lead engineer spends more time in interviews than they need to. A recruiter who understands space has the language to translate between the engineer who’s interested in the job and the one who needs it filled.

The Capacity Problem

A specialist desk embedded in space can put a whole team on a single skill set. If a client needs thirty propulsion engineers in a quarter, several recruiters work that search together to make it happen. One or two internal recruiters covering every department at once don’t have that option, no matter how good they are.

Space Recruitment Is Harder Than Other Engineering Sectors

We’ve mentioned a few reasons why space roles take longer to fill than most technical searches. But space is also different from other engineering sectors in a few specific ways.

The Mid-Career Experience Gap in Space Engineering

Space startups are securing funding and growing faster than the industry can produce the talent to staff them. The number of companies raising early-stage funding in the space economy has more than doubled since 2016, per Space Capital’s Space IQ report. There simply aren’t enough mid-level engineers who’ve seen a program through from start to finish, and for a startup to succeed, that’s the experience sweet spot.

These candidates aren’t out there applying for jobs. They don’t have to. They move based on trusted relationships and opportunities passed along the grapevine. That’s where an experienced space recruiter’s network can help, and where your TA team could really struggle.

And mid-career candidates won’t move for just any role either. Recruiters experienced in the space industry have seen enough to tell you what it takes to stand out as an employer of choice. They know what it takes to compete for that candidate, and how to close someone already weighing two or three other offers.

Security Clearance and ITAR Requirements

Because most clients in the space industry are government entities, the need for candidates who are already security cleared, combined with ITAR requirements, adds another layer of complexity.

Cleared candidates are already scarce, and competition is increasing. Add ITAR and export-control rules on top, and they rule out large parts of the general talent pool before a search even starts.

Geographic Concentration of Space Talent

Space talent clusters in a handful of hubs. For example, Colorado alone employs more than 55,000 people directly in aerospace and ranks first in the nation for aerospace employment per capita. A hiring surge in one of these hubs pits every employer there against the same small local pool, unless you find someone willing to relocate.

Relocation isn’t new in this industry, but it’s less avoidable than in most. A software company facing a tough local market can make the role remote. In Space, that won’t work because physical hardware, test campaigns, and secure facilities keep the job tied to one site. That means a hiring surge in one of these hubs pits every employer there against the same small local pool, unless you find someone willing to relocate. A relocation process needs to be handled with gloves to make sure everything goes to plan. That’s part and parcel of recruiting in the space industry, and we advise candidates on it daily.

Compressed Program Timelines

Commercial satellite programs now typically move from contract start to launch in 2 to 3 years, against a US government average of more than 10 years for complex space systems. That means missing the hiring window on a two-year program means liftoff never happens.

A Specialist Recruiter Means Time Back for Your TA Team

A TA function still has a place in an early-stage space company that a specialist desk can’t replace. They understand the company’s culture, its full hiring needs across every department, and the day-to-day relationship with each hiring manager. Your internal TA team can make the case for what makes your company worth joining, the culture, and the mission you’re on.

The space industry has real hiring challenges, but you don’t have to solve them with your internal team alone. Specialists who have helped space startups scale from seed to Series C bring a network of security-cleared, passive engineers and enough dedicated people to work the hardest searches. That’s the gap a specialist desk fills, so your TA team can focus on everything only they can do.

We know you want the best technical talent out there, but most engineers in space already have a job they like. They don’t need to prove themselves and have no desire to spend hours working on a technical test. Finding and keeping the best engineers means rethinking how you use the limited time you get with them. We’ll show you how.

Does Your Interview Process Attract Passive Talent? 

A flight software engineer who’s shipped mission-critical code, or a GNC engineer who’s run their algorithms through a live validation cycle, is usually a few years into a role they’re not desperate to leave. And if they are thinking of leaving, their LinkedIn inbox is already flooded with opportunities. 

That’s what “passive candidate” means in practice: comfortably employed, not browsing job boards, and only interested if something compelling enough comes along.  If your mission and your product appeal to an engineer, they’ll apply their own filters before saying yes to an interview. Once you’ve got a strong candidate interested, the last thing you want is to lose the candidate due to an overly complicated technical stage.

We’ve been seeing engineers leaning toward the promise of faster liftoff startups offer and away from the slower pace of primes. This alone should tell you what they would expect from your interview process. 

The Cost of a Technical Test 

A take-home technical test is meant to filter for skill. In practice, it filters for something else: the willingness to sacrifice limited free time.

An active candidate will usually make the time. A passive one has no reason to. If you’re interviewing high-demand talent your recruiter has managed to headhunt directly, your interview process is as much a selling point as your company.

A take-home makes sense if you’re testing a developer. For a structural or propulsion engineer, the equivalent ask is a design review or a walkthrough of a real analysis. Either way, the test is a warning sign: it means the company hasn’t thought about the candidate’s time at all. 

A Screening Process Designed for Passive Talent 

One of our recruiters watched a fast-growing engineering team solve this exact problem. Every strong engineer they interviewed had other opportunities coming their way, sometimes half a dozen or more. A four-hour take-home test wasn’t just unpopular. It was actively costing them candidates.

So what did they do? 

They replaced a four-hour technical test with a 90-minute technical conversation. Here’s what they talked about:

• how the candidate approached a real flight software or GNC problem they’ve shipped
• tools they used
• what their process looked like on a real project
• how they’d handle a crisis

That’s it. That change in their interview process helped the company grow its engineering team from two people to 45 over roughly four years, with a 98% retention rate across that period.

An Interview Process to Attract and Retain the Best Engineers 

Here’s what to change if you want the same results with the passive engineering talent you need.

A considered interview process is not a checkbox exercise. This example proves that interviews can impact your long-term candidate retention as much as they can help you vet the technical skills you need. 

• Replace the take-home with a scoped, time-boxed conversation, no more than 90 minutes, with the team the engineer will be working with.
• Ask about work they’ve already done: What have they built? Why have they made this decision and not that one? What would they change now? 
• Respect the clock. If a passive candidate has agreed to interview, don’t spend it testing their patience.  

A 90-minute conversation about how someone solves problems in the real world raises the bar on the candidates you have access to. It tests the actual job, not a synthetic one. Most of what a strong engineer does day to day is explain tradeoffs, defend decisions, and think out loud with teammates, not solve an isolated puzzle alone. A conversation tests that directly. A take-home tests something adjacent to it at best.

None of that matters if the candidate never hears about the role in the first place. Reach is still the harder problem, and it’s where a recruiter earns their keep: spotting the right profile, building the relationship, and selling the opportunity well enough that someone happily employed says yes to a conversation.

The Takeaway

Every open role in space is competing for a small pool of people who mostly aren’t looking. Your best candidate is not waiting to prove themselves. By using your interview slots wisely, you can show an engineer you value their time and skills. By doing that, you’ll find and keep the engineers who will help you scale.

How many roles are you hiring for, and over what period? If there’s one hire you can’t afford to get wrong, hand it to us. You don’t have the time to chase a candidate pool this small on your own, and you shouldn’t have to. If you’re not sure which of our solutions fits where you’re at, take a look and find the right one for your stage. 

The US Defense Department is beefing up its space capabilities and companies of all sizes are getting in on it. The problem? To deliver on these contracts, they’re all after the same finite thing: people with existing security clearance.

More and More Space Companies Are Chasing Defense Dollars

Lately, a lot of money has been directed towards defense work, especially for work in the space industry:

• President Trump created the Office of Golden Dome for America in May 2025, tasked with building a new missile defense system with major space components.
• Defense-tech VC funding hit an all-time high of $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026 alone, already past all of 2025’s full-year record of $9.6 billion.
• The Space Force’s FY2027 budget request would more than double its FY2026 funding, a 124% jump and the largest proposed increase for any military service in roughly 75 years.

Not Everyone Can Staff the Contract

Defense leaning into space is good news for startups who want to get in on the action. That’s exactly what the Department of War had in mind with the digital hub they opened on the 11th of August. The hub has been built specifically to pull more startups and commercial space companies into Golden Dome-adjacent work. It sits alongside the Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD contract vehicle, which has now approved 2,440 of 2,463 applicant companies for a pool worth up to $151 billion.

Approval Is No Longer the Bottleneck

That’s a 99% approval rate, and here’s what happens when you get approved. A SHIELD approval means you can now bid on task orders. It’s not a funded contract. Most of the companies in that 2,440 will never see funded work under it. The Missile Defense Agency has said as much directly. So winning task orders is one problem. Staffing them with cleared people is a separate one, and it’s the one that takes the most time. Here’s our advice: as a rule of thumb, if you can’t answer ‘Who will do this work, at what clearance level, and by when?’ before you sign, you’re not ready to bid.

Who You Know, Not Just What You Know  

It’s important for startup founders to understand what they’re up against once they win a slice of the defense pie. Picture this: you just won your first Golden Dome-adjacent task order. Congrats. Now you have 90 days to staff five TS/SCI roles or risk losing the contract. 

Investment into the defense industry may prompt more engineers to get clearance sorted in time. But for now, the skills shortage is very real, even for founders who don’t need cleared talent.

Add a need for clearance into the mix and it’s a double whammy. When it comes to cleared talent, the problem is not only “who can do the job?” but “who do you know that can do the job?”.

Why Cleared Roles Are So Hard to Fill

First, let’s clarify a common misconception. Founders often treat a lack of cleared talent the way they’d treat any other space hiring gap: too few systems engineers, too few propulsion specialists, not enough people who’ve built flight hardware before. Let’s throw more money at it. It’s an easy mistake to make in an industry where talent is so hard to come by anyway. But a skills gap is one you can only close with training, time, or a strong enough offer, while a shortage of cleared talent is a paperwork problem that’s out of your hands.

Cleared Hiring Is a Network Game 

You either hold clearance at a given level or you don’t. It’s not something you can grow into or “pick up on the job”. We’ve seen how work moves on the government-facing side of this industry. Almost nobody lands a defense-adjacent role based on a cold application. They get it through a person they already worked with: a former colleague, a past program, or someone from the same small, security-cleared circle they’ve known for years. That’s why no amount of money solves your immediate problem of hiring a cleared engineer.

In the words of Sam Wiltshire, one of our own recruiters:

“If they need clearance to start with, it makes the search harder, because […] there’s only a limited number of people that are cleared.”

You Have Two Options

Startups have two options when it comes to hiring cleared talent: hire engineers who are already cleared, or wait for clearance to come through once you’ve extended an offer. Both have their problems, but your best bet is the first. There are no easy answers when it comes to retaining cleared talent for defense contracts.

How Clearance Works in the US

The Three Clearance Levels

There are three levels of clearance available in the US: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, each requiring a deeper federal background investigation than the one before it. The investigation covers finances, foreign contacts, criminal history, and drug use, going back further and digging harder the higher the level.

Accessing cleared talent is all about timing, and startups in space need the talent yesterday to avoid wasting their runway. But time is not on your side when you have to get clearance sorted from scratch.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, it took between 156 days and 227 days for most of the Secret and Top Secret Clearances to finish. If a candidate already holds an active clearance at the same level from a previous cleared role, reciprocity typically allows a new employer to bring them onto a contract in one to four weeks instead.

But Wait, Can You Sponsor Clearance?

Before advertising cleared roles, founders need to ensure their company can legally sponsor a clearance. Even if you’ve raised a strong round and won a real defense-adjacent contract, you can’t sponsor a single clearance if your business doesn’t have what’s called a Facility Security Clearance (FSC).

Here’s what founders are up against:

• FSC timeline: 3 – 6 months
• New clearance: 5 – 7+ months
• Reciprocity: 1 – 4 weeks

So the time it takes you to hire and clear the team directly determines when you can deliver. Cleared talent is not a separate HR issue; it’s the key to delivering your contract on time.

Runway Math: How Clearance Timelines Eat Your Cash 

Win the contract and use it to sponsor the FSC. Only then can clearance sponsorship start for anyone you hire. The FSC process itself typically runs three to six months from sponsorship to approval, longer if the paperwork comes back incomplete on the first pass.

What changes the hiring outcome is where you stand the day the FSC clears. If the people you want are already cleared, reciprocity turns their start date into weeks. If you’re starting the candidate search from zero on the same day, you’re stacking two multi-month timelines back to back. That also means you’re looking at eight to thirteen months, the better part of a year, before anyone’s doing billable work on the contract. 

Getting ahead of that means building relationships with cleared candidates before the FSC exists to sponsor them. Your job as a founder is to get into that circle before you need it. A recruiter who already knows the cleared talent pool can be doing the groundwork of networking with already cleared engineers, while your paperwork is still moving through DCSA. Winning the contract isn’t the finish line. Delivering on it depends on the cleared-staffing plan you built before you signed.