Vantaggi
Work on problems all across the aerospace and defense industry, great forgetting exposed an overview of topics. Common areas include: satellite trajectories and flight dynamics, orbit determination, visibility times, scheduling, area coverage, remote imaging and detection, aircraft flight routes, hypersonic vehicles, missile trajectories, digital engineering, integration with other tools, scripting, various geometry problems, and much more. Strong emphasize on developing new skills, especially with the addition of Ansys tool suite. You get the access to millions of dollars of software and there are plenty of resources to learn them. You get to work with and guide customers in solving real world problems for upcoming and operational missions. Friendly and very knowledgeable coworkers. Good work culture. A lot of autonomy in terms of what you get to do in your day to day activities. And good work hours and perks.
Svantaggi
As a field applications engineer the role requires a good bit of being proactive engagement with customers and a lot of follow ups. It is almost a hybrid of a technical engineering role and a sales role. If you enjoy customer discovery this may not be a con, but it does take away from working on technical problems or other tasks you need to accomplish. Unfortunately this hybrid role sometimes leads to more of a jack of all trades feeling and lack of depth in certain fields which you are expected to be knowledgeable. Although you usually can reach out to colleagues for support. During times of covid and the acquisition of AGI by Ansys, there is a lot of uncertainty. And a feeling of disconnect with the headquarter, where most employees are located. Senior leadership had tried to address this as best they can. Lastly, there is just too much to do, there is never a shortage of work, so it may be a bit overwhelming at times, and it is a constant juggling act to prioritize key tasks.