This is all my personal experience working there for two years as an extremely junior engineer more than five years ago, so take with a grain of salt. JPL’s cu

This is all my personal experience working there for two years as an extremely junior engineer more than five years ago, so take with a grain of salt. JPL’s culture is very academic in nature. I mean JPL is literally an arm of Caltech that contracts exclusively to NASA and a limited set of other federal bodies. My experience was that there wasn’t a huge focus there on career growth. Many people there seemed to be happy to spend decades doing basically the same job. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to work. A lot of incredible technical talent and extremely interesting people work there just because it’s JPL. The campus is gorgeous, Pasadena is an insanely nice place to live. Downside is JPL salaries are on the low end even for aerospace and Pasadena is expensive. Personally I just wanted a more dynamic work environment.