Ask HN: Are there worldwide remote software jobs in aerospace?

I was contacted by some aerospace company and the first things they asked about were my security clearance and whether I could be in New York in a couple of days.

I do not hold a U.S citizenship and I was/am in Algeria.

I'm a fully remote software engineer at Planet Labs. I'm really limited in what I can talk about because the company is going public in December, but you should check out the website and careers page. I can say there are international remote employees in many roles.

I can't answer whether any company whatsoever does purely commercial work with no ITAR restrictions, but mostly this won't be the case. US aerospace companies mostly all do US defense work, and in order to be able to do that, they need to prove to the DoD that all of their network infrastructure is secure in particular ways, and that includes pretty strict separation of anything that touches ITAR covered data from everything else. This usually means most jobs are going to require you to be a US person physically residing in the United States. They don't want to risk some diagram you need to look at going across transatlantic cables to get to your workstation. Doesn't matter if it's end to end encrypted, VPN, whatever, they still don't want to risk the intelligence service, secret police, whatever it is of your country coming into your house at gunpoint and forcing you to login and retrieve stuff they're not supposed to see.

Fair or not, this kind of thing will prevent true workforce internationalization and parity between US and non-US developers well into the indefinite future. Remote jobs certainly exist even in aerospace and defense, but not global remote.

No, basically all aerospace is going to be export controlled and likely require a security clearance in the US.

There’s a handful of YC Companies that have various aerospace products. They may have or be open to remote depending on the role.