Last updated: September 15, 2026
Engineering Staffing Jacksonville, FL
KORE1 places mechanical, electrical, manufacturing and quality engineers across Northeast Florida, for the Navy depots, device plants and shipyards that all recruit from one short bench.
Start a Jacksonville Engineering Search
KORE1 is a Jacksonville, FL engineering staffing agency placing mechanical, electrical, manufacturing and quality engineers with Northeast Florida employers. Most contract and direct-hire searches close within three to six weeks.
Ask someone from out of town what Jacksonville does and you’ll hear banking, insurance and a lot of office parks off Butler Boulevard. Fair enough. It just isn’t where the engineers are. They’re at an air station on the west bank of the St. Johns, in a contact lens plant, on a shiplift near Mayport, and inside an eight-bay hangar at Cecil Airport.
Start at NAS Jacksonville. Fleet Readiness Center Southeast is, in the Navy’s own words, the largest maintenance, repair and overhaul provider in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, with roughly 5,000 civilian, military and contract workers rebuilding aircraft and the engines that fly them. F404s. F414s. T-45 trainers on a life-extension line. In 2022 NAVAIR began standing up a second repair source for the F-35’s F135 engine on the same base, which is not the kind of work anyone plans to move.
Out west at Cecil Airport, Boeing opened a $245.8 million, eight-bay maintenance hangar in 2024 for P-8s, KC-46 tankers and Super Hornets, the Blue Angels’ jets included, and a second hangar for KC-46 work is still under construction next door. Down in St. Augustine, Northrop Grumman builds the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye start to finish. About three a year. More than 900 local jobs.
Here’s the part almost nobody guesses. Johnson & Johnson Vision makes more than 1.7 billion ACUVUE contact lenses a year in Jacksonville for patients in the U.S., has been here since 1981, and in June 2026 committed more than $1 billion to a new packaging and distribution building and upgrades to the lens plant. Medtronic runs its ENT business out of Southpoint. Anheuser-Busch has brewed on the Northside since 1969.
The river keeps its own economy, too. BAE Systems opened a $250 million, 25,000-ton shiplift at its Jacksonville yard in June 2025, upriver from the destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships homeported at Naval Station Mayport. The Army Corps of Engineers finished deepening the harbor to 47 feet out to Blount Island in 2022. Deeper channel. Bigger hulls in it.
A Navy depot, two planemakers, a lens plant and a shipyard, all hiring out of a metro with about 1,200 mechanical engineers in it.
That number is most of the story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about 1,210 mechanical engineers and 570 electrical engineers in the Jacksonville metro in May 2025, and both jobs are less concentrated here than they are nationally. Every one of those employers wants a different slice of that group. They don’t share well. Depot work runs on NAVAIR and manufacturer data, device plants run on FDA design controls, and ship repair runs on Navy work packages and class rules.
So the real job of an engineering staffing agency here is knowing which rulebook a candidate has actually lived under, because resumes rarely say. Our engineering recruiters have run these searches since KORE1 opened in 2005, and they read a hangar resume very differently than a plant resume. Software, data and security roles go to our Jacksonville IT staffing team. Everything outside engineering runs through the Jacksonville staffing agency desk.
Then there’s pay. Mean pay for mechanical engineers in Jacksonville runs about 7% under the national figure, and Florida doesn’t tax wages at the state level. Candidates moving in from Atlanta or Charlotte do that math themselves, usually before the second call. Many like the answer.
Depot Engineering at NAS Jax, Cecil and St. Augustine
Depot engineering is its own trade. The design authority lives somewhere else, usually NAVAIR or the aircraft’s manufacturer, and the engineer on the floor works inside that data, writing dispositions for the cracks, corrosion and worn fittings the drawing never planned for.
We’ve watched excellent design engineers last six weeks in it. The ones who fit tend to stay put for a very long time.
The mismatch we see most often comes out of commercial product development, where an engineer who finds a problem gets to redesign the part. On a depot line you don’t. You document it, route it for approval and keep the aircraft moving while you wait, and whether someone can live with that predicts their first year better than anything on the resume. We ask early.
- Mechanical and reliability engineers for engine, gearbox and component overhaul
- Structures and aerospace engineers who write repair dispositions against somebody else’s approved data
- Quality engineers who’ve carried an AS9100 or AS9110 system through a surveillance audit and kept the certificate
- Would you hire an avionics engineer who has never traced a wiring harness fault? The hangar wouldn’t, so our electrical engineering screen starts there
- Industrial engineers who can take hours out of a hangar flow without skipping a step
Clearances come up constantly. Not every seat needs one. Most defense work in this corridor does require a U.S. person under export rules, though, and some contractor roles need an active Secret on day one, so we pin that down with you before a single resume goes out.
Validated Lines, Brewhouses and Paper Mills
A contact lens is a regulated medical device, and Jacksonville turns out well over a billion of them a year. That puts FDA design controls, process validation and statistical process control in front of every manufacturing engineer and quality engineer on those lines. Device work pulls in biomedical engineers too. Tuning a can line at a brewery is real engineering too. It’s just a different day.
The rest of the manufacturing base is wider than people expect. Medtronic’s ENT campus hires mechanical and test engineers. Swisher is putting $135 million into an automated plant in Springfield. Up in Fernandina Beach the Smurfit Westrock mill has about 600 people, Georgia-Pacific’s Palatka mill has about 1,000, and mills like those live on reliability and process engineers who’ve made peace with rotating shifts.
Here’s the screen.
- Validation they owned. IQ, OQ and PQ protocols the candidate wrote and ran, not ones they reviewed after someone else did
- SPC used to stop a line, which is a different skill from building control charts for a monthly meeting
- Controls and automation engineers who can open the PLC program on the machine they support and explain it
- Design engineers who’ve taken a part through tooling, first article inspection and a production ramp
- Nights. If the plant runs around the clock, we find out whether a candidate has actually worked them
Some of these seats are a contract engineer for a validation push or a line transfer, and some are direct hire roles a plant manager wants filled for the next ten years. Contract-to-hire works when the fit is still an open question. Project staffing suits a capital project that needs three or four engineers at once. You’ll have the rate or the fee in writing before you see a single name.
Jacksonville’s Engineering Bench, Counted
Before a role gets posted, it helps to know how many people could plausibly take it. These are the federal counts for the Jacksonville metro, how concentrated each job is here compared with the country, and how local pay stacks up. The bars show headcount. The line under each one is our read.
Figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the Jacksonville, FL metro area, May 2025. Concentration is the BLS location quotient, where 1.00 matches the national share of jobs, and pay is the annual mean wage.
Where Engineering Jobs Sit Along the St. Johns
Jacksonville is enormous. Count the water and it’s about 874 square miles, the largest city footprint in the lower 48. The St. Johns River runs north right through the middle. That river decides commutes. Offer an Orange Park engineer a job at Mayport and you’ll hear about the bridges before you hear about the salary.
- Westside and Cecil NAS Jacksonville and its depot on the river, Boeing’s hangars at Cecil Airport, Saft’s lithium-ion battery plant, and Cecil Spaceport’s 12,503-foot runway
- Northside and Springfield the Anheuser-Busch brewery, Bacardi’s bottling campus, Swisher’s plant expansion, and the new Johnson & Johnson Vision distribution building at Airport Commerce Center
- Southside and Southpoint the J&J Vision lens plant on Centurion Parkway, Medtronic’s ENT campus, and Redwire’s headquarters and flight hardware shop on Philips Highway
- Downtown and the Southbank CSX headquarters on Water Street, JEA, the Army Corps’ Jacksonville District, and Haskell’s new headquarters on San Marco Boulevard
- Heckscher Drive to Mayport BAE Systems’ shiplift, JAXPORT’s Blount Island terminal, Marine Corps Blount Island Command, and the destroyers at Naval Station Mayport
- St. Augustine, Palatka and Fernandina Beach Northrop Grumman’s E-2D line, the Georgia-Pacific mill in Palatka, and the Smurfit Westrock mill on Amelia Island
- Kings Bay, Georgia about 40 miles north, where the Trident Refit Facility draws on the same mechanical and electrical bench
Mandarin is worth a detour. Stellar runs its global headquarters from Hartley Road and designs food, beverage and cold storage plants for clients well outside Florida, so a lot of refrigeration and process design happens here even when the plant goes up three states away. Florida searches that stretch past the First Coast go through our engineering desks in Orlando, Tampa and Miami.
Beyond the Depots and the Plants
Aviation and regulated manufacturing carry most of this desk’s mechanical and manufacturing volume. These four carry a lot of the electrical, controls and systems work.
Ship Repair & Maritime
BAE’s 25,000-ton shiplift, Mayport’s destroyers and Crowley’s headquarters. Marine mechanical, HVAC and electrical engineers who can read a work package.
Rail, Port & Logistics
CSX and Florida East Coast Railway both run from Jacksonville, and JAXPORT moves cargo through Blount Island. Industrial and rolling-stock reliability engineers.
Power & Water Utilities
JEA runs the city’s electric, water and sewer systems and buys power from Georgia’s Plant Vogtle. Power systems and controls engineers.
Space & Design-Build
Redwire builds flight hardware here, Cecil Spaceport is licensed for horizontal launch, and RS&H has engineered from Jacksonville since 1941. Design and project engineers.
Common Questions From Jacksonville Hiring Managers
How does an engineering staffing agency in Jacksonville work?
An engineering staffing agency in Jacksonville finds, screens and presents engineers for a company’s open roles, then manages interviews and the offer, on contract or direct hire. At KORE1 every candidate gets a technical call before you see their name. That call is mostly about what resumes hide. Lots of engineers list AS9100 or FDA experience, and far fewer wrote the repair disposition or the validation protocol themselves.
Which engineering roles does KORE1 fill in Jacksonville?
Mechanical, manufacturing and quality engineers make up most of the Jacksonville desk, followed by electrical, controls and reliability engineers. Aerospace and structures engineers come up constantly because of the depot at NAS Jax, Boeing at Cecil and the E-2D line in St. Augustine. We also fill process, industrial, design and project engineering roles. New grads to principal engineers, and the managers above them.
What’s a realistic timeline for filling an engineering job in Jacksonville?
Three to six weeks is realistic for most engineering roles in Jacksonville, measured from the first intake call to an accepted offer. Manufacturing and quality roles tend to move fastest. Electrical doesn’t. BLS counted only about 570 electrical engineers in the whole metro in May 2025, so a strong slate often includes people from Orlando or Atlanta, and a role that needs an active clearance or a Florida PE license can stretch past eight weeks.
Do you recruit engineers for defense work around NAS Jax, Cecil and Mayport?
Yes, KORE1 recruits engineers for the defense contractors, aircraft maintenance firms and ship repair yards working around NAS Jacksonville, Cecil Airport and Naval Station Mayport. Most of those seats require a U.S. person under export control rules. Some need an active Secret clearance on day one, and we confirm which before sourcing starts. Civil service jobs at Fleet Readiness Center Southeast itself go through NAVAIR’s own hiring, so our depot work is with the contractors and suppliers around the base.
Can you find engineers with FDA-regulated manufacturing experience?
KORE1 regularly places manufacturing, quality and design engineers with FDA-regulated experience, a steady request in a metro where Johnson & Johnson Vision makes more than 1.7 billion contact lenses a year. We screen for people who wrote and executed validation protocols under design controls and ISO 13485. Then we ask about a deviation they had to close. That second question separates the people who did the work from the people who signed it, quickly.
What do mechanical and electrical engineers earn in Jacksonville?
$105,550 was the mean annual wage for mechanical engineers in the Jacksonville metro in May 2025, and electrical engineers averaged $118,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both sit roughly 6 to 7% under the national mean. Taxes close some of that. Florida doesn’t tax wages, while Georgia and North Carolina take a cut of every paycheck. Industrial engineers came in at $103,170.
What should we budget to hire an engineer through a Jacksonville staffing agency?
Engineering placements through KORE1 are priced one of two ways, an hourly bill rate for contract engineers or a one-time fee based on first-year salary for direct hire. The hourly rate is all-in. Pay, payroll taxes, workers’ comp and our margin sit inside it. Contract-to-hire splits the difference, with conversion terms agreed in writing before the engineer’s first day, and direct placements carry a replacement guarantee.
Hiring an Engineer in Jacksonville?
Tell us what the role supports, whether that’s a hangar, a validated line or a ship in the dock, who signs off on the work, and how long the seat has been empty. We’ll say on that first call whether the local bench can fill it or whether the search needs to reach Orlando and Atlanta. We’ll tell you if it’s a long shot.
Talk to a Jacksonville Engineering Recruiter