Unable to find a job as a programmer, he became a drone assembler. What positions do miltech companies hire Junkies for?

There are few vacancies for Junens, but they do exist.

According to DOU, there are currently 81 open positions in the Defense Tech category for candidates with up to a year of experience. Djinni has another 112 open positions in the miltech field for professionals with no experience or up to a year of experience.

At the same time, the demand for specialists in the industry continues to grow rapidly. According to robota.ua CEO Valeriy Reshetnyak, the number of vacancies in Defense Tech has increased tenfold compared to 2022, and in the last year alone the market has actually doubled. The platform currently hosts over 3,000 vacancies in the field of defense technologies.

And although most vacancies for beginners are not about classic development, the defense industry is today becoming one of the few sectors of the technology market where young specialists are ready to be given a chance to start their careers.

Not a single code: from what positions do the Junos enter miltech

If June imagines his first job as writing code, defense tech might surprise him.

Most often, companies open their doors through production, testing, and equipment operations.

According to responses from SKIFTECH, HIMERA, WIY, and BlueBird, the most common starting roles for candidates without commercial experience are:

• QA / Testing Engineer;
• Assembly Specialist;
• electronics installer;
• shareholder;
• assistant engineer;
• R&D technical assistant;
• Junior Embedded Engineer;
• CAD Engineer;
• Production Coordinator;
• Logistics & Supply Analyst;
• REA engineer;
• Junior FPGA Engineer.

For most such vacancies, companies expect basic technical training, a willingness to learn quickly, and an interest in hardware products.

At BlueBird, starting roles include electronics assemblers and installers, part assemblers, testers, assistant engineers, and technical assistants in R&D.

WIY has a similar, though somewhat broader, list. They are willing to consider beginners for the positions of Operator / Assembly Specialist, QA / Testing Engineer, CAD Engineer, Logistics & Supply Analyst, and Production Coordinator.

HIMERA says it is hiring junior specialists for production, business, and engineering roles. Areas include embedded, hardware, QA, electronics manufacturing and assembly, as well as some operational positions.

Unlike classic IT, where most products exist exclusively in a digital environment, miltech remains largely a hardware business. Here you need not only to write code, but also to assemble devices, work with electronics, test equipment, prepare prototypes and test them in real conditions.

That’s why the first step in a career is often production or testing roles, not development.

Why companies are willing to train people without experience

A few years ago, most employers could afford to look for ready-made specialists. In defense tech, this model is working less and less. The reason is simple: the industry is growing faster than the talent pool can be formed.

WIY directly says that miltech companies are ready to invest in training young specialists, since the market is still being formed and there is not enough qualified personnel.

HIMERA also emphasizes that they consider candidates with different professional backgrounds, including switchers.

A similar logic is described in SKIFTECH. The simulator manufacturer admits that some engineering and R&D positions still require a Middle+ level due to the complexity of the tasks. However, at the same time, the company has successful cases of hiring junior specialists who compensated for the lack of commercial experience with strong theoretical training and motivation.

It’s not just employers who are saying that the market has begun to open up for young engineers. Slava Pavlyuk, an HR specialist at defense tech companies, previously pointed out that the situation for hardware graduates has changed dramatically. «Let someone say that there are no vacancies in DefTech without experience,» he notes .

According to Pavlyuk, a few years ago, young engineers could often only count on working as «factory workers.» Now companies are opening vacancies for Junior Embedded Engineers, Junior FPGA Engineers, and REA engineers, offering training, career growth, and work on real products.

There is a shortage of staff, but they no longer accept reservations here.

Despite the talent shortage, defense tech has recently become much more attentive to candidate motivation. During DOU Day, industry representatives explicitly stated that the desire to get a reservation is not a sufficient reason for hiring.

At the same time, the industry is increasingly attracting people interested in complex engineering challenges. Market representatives spoke about cases of Ukrainian senior developers returning from abroad specifically to work at miltech, as well as hiring engineers from the US and Canada.

Defense tech juniors get paid more than the average IT job

Despite the widespread belief that the defense sector loses out to classic IT in terms of salaries, for beginners the situation looks somewhat different.

According to DOU research, the median salary of Junior and Intern/Trainee Software Engineers in defense tech is $1,100. For comparison, the average median salary of juniors in Ukrainian IT in general is $830.

However, as experience increases, the difference changes in favor of classic IT. The overall median salary for a defense tech developer is $2,850, which is about 14% less than the industry average. According to DOU, more than half of male defense tech developers have a reservation (55%), another 28% use a deferral.

The industry also works much more often in an office or hybrid format. If in Ukrainian IT only 4% of developers work exclusively from the office, then in defense tech this figure is already 30%. Another 44% work in a hybrid format.

From assembler to engineer — no longer an exception

The story of the candidate from SKIFTECH would hardly have seemed typical for Ukrainian IT a few years ago. Today, it no longer seems so unusual. Defense tech still urgently needs experienced engineers, but at the same time, it is increasingly building its own personnel elevators. People are hired for production roles, trained to work with equipment, involved in testing or installing electronics, and then given the opportunity to move to engineering teams.

For young professionals, this means one important thing: your first tech job in 2026 may not start with Front-end, Mobile, or AI. Sometimes it starts with assembling a drone, soldering a circuit board, or testing a radio station in production.

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