Utah's largest single-site employer and second-largest Air Force base — the depot that keeps the F-35, F-22, F-16, A-10, and the Minuteman/Sentinel ICBM force flying, and the host for the 309th's software work and the UTTR test range.

Hill Air Force Base

venture confidence: Medium status: Draft updated 2026-08-11

Type: venture
Status: Draft
Confidence: Medium
Tier: A
Focus: depot maintenance, fighter jet sustainment, ICBM sustainment, flight test, defense engineering workforce, economic impact
Roles: hardware-engineering, software-engineering, manufacturing-operations, field-skilled-trades, program-project-management, finance-accounting
Stage: Established U.S. Air Force installation; continuous operation since 1940
Ownership: government
Primary Location: Hill Air Force Base, UT
Utah Location: Hill Air Force Base, UT
Region: Hill Air Force Base
Careers: https://www.hill.af.mil/About-Us/Employment/
Website: https://www.hill.af.mil/
Domain: aerospace-defense
Updated: 2026-08-11
Needs-reviewed: 2026-08-11
Relates: cites Official Website: Hill Air Force Base · https://www.hill.af.mil/

Summary

Hill Air Force Base is a U.S. Air Force installation in northern Utah (spanning parts of Layton, Clearfield, Sunset, and Roy along the Wasatch Front), hosted by the 75th Air Base Wing. It traces to a 1939 Congressional appropriation for the "Ogden Air Depot," was activated as Hill Field on November 7, 1940, and was renamed Hill Air Force Base in 1948. Today it is, by the Air Force's own description, the service's second-largest base by population and geographic size, and it is Utah's largest single-site employer.

Three things make Hill load-bearing rather than merely large. First, the Ogden Air Logistics Complex (OO-ALC) — Hill's largest tenant, known internally as the "Fighter Depot" — performs the depot-level maintenance, repair, overhaul, and engineering that keeps the F-35 Lightning II, F-22 Raptor, F-16 Fighting Falcon, A-10 Thunderbolt II, and C-130 Hercules flying, and sustains the Minuteman III ICBM force while standing up support for its Sentinel replacement. Second, the 388th Fighter Wing (active duty) and Air Force Reserve's 419th Fighter Wing fly and maintain 78 F-35A aircraft here in a Total Force partnership. Third, the 309th Software Engineering Group writes and sustains flight, weapons, and mission software for most of that same fleet — documented on its own page rather than repeated here.

For the wiki, Hill is a government installation, not a company: government pay scales, clearance gates, and institutional process govern almost every role here, and much of the substantive engineering work is classified or program-sensitive, so this page describes structure and public magnitude rather than specific weapons-sustainment content. It is one of the clearest examples in Utah of work that is both genuinely large in scale and genuinely difficult to independently verify past what the Air Force itself publishes.

Impact

Direct impact is straightforward to state and hard to overstate: Hill sustains a meaningful share of the U.S. Air Force's fighter and attack fleet and the land leg of the nuclear triad. The base's own 2024 Economic Impact Statement reports a total workforce of 26,893 (active duty, Air Force Reserve/Guard, government civilians, and contract civilians combined) and a total annual economic impact of $12.76 billion, supporting an estimated 67,046 direct and indirect Utah jobs (official source) — a scale that makes Hill comparable to the state's largest private employers, funded instead by the federal government.

Permanence and bounds cut in different directions. Hill has operated continuously for over 85 years and its sustainment mission (depot maintenance for fielded weapon systems) is inherently durable — aircraft need maintenance for as long as they fly, regardless of which contractor built them. But most of that work is sustainment and repair of existing, mature systems rather than new-system development; the frontier engineering in Utah's defense-aerospace cluster (solid rocket motor redesign, for instance) sits at Northrop Grumman's Promontory facility, not here, with the notable exception of the 309th's software modernization work. Counterfactually, Hill is one of only three Air Force Sustainment Center air logistics complexes in the country and the only one that services the F-35, F-22, F-16, and A-10 together with the ICBM force — there is no ready alternative depot for most of this work in the near term.

The ethical dimension deserves the same treatment given to Utah's other defense-prime work on this wiki: Hill exists to keep combat aircraft and a nuclear deterrent force operational. Whether one reads that as stabilizing deterrence or as a moral weight to carry, it is not neutral, and prospective employees should think about it directly rather than treat depot work as ethically inert simply because it is "maintenance" rather than "weapons development."

Utah Context

Hill anchors the Wasatch Front's defense-and-aerospace cluster from the north, distinct from but closely linked to the 309th Software Engineering Group it hosts, L3Harris Salt Lake City's communications and EW work, and Northrop Grumman's Promontory facility, which builds the solid rocket motors for the Sentinel ICBM that Hill will eventually sustain. The Utah Test and Training Range — 1.1 million acres of ground range plus a much larger restricted-airspace block in the West Desert — is operated as a Hill tenant activity and used by the 388th/419th Fighter Wings; Dugway Proving Ground is a separate Army facility in the same West Desert defense-test geography, not a Hill tenant. 47G, the statewide aerospace/defense association, treats Hill as one of the anchors of the ecosystem it organizes around.

Hill's civilian and contractor workforce also feeds a well-documented talent pipeline into Utah defense-tech startups and primes, a dynamic the 309th's own page discusses in more detail.

What They Need Now

Hill hires along two entirely separate tracks. Uniformed military careers (officer, enlisted, healthcare) route through airforce.com. Civilian federal employment — the larger and more relevant track for most wiki readers — routes primarily through USAJOBS.gov, with two notable shortcuts the base itself advertises: a direct-to-recruiter path for engineering and scientist candidates with a BS or higher (bypassing the standard USAJOBS queue by emailing a resume and transcripts directly to the Science and Engineering Recruitment Team), and periodic Direct Hire Authority windows for a defined list of skilled-trade occupations at OO-ALC that let experienced tradespeople submit resumes directly rather than through USAJOBS.

The base's own employment materials name engineers (mechanical, electrical, software, avionics), scientists, contracting specialists, financial-management specialists, budget analysts, cost estimators, logistics and supply-chain management specialists, security/police officers, and skilled-trade production and maintenance occupations as consistently high-demand civilian career areas. Software specifically is concentrated in the 309th Software Engineering Group, which maintains its own careers page. Most substantive roles require a Secret or Top Secret clearance; government pay scales (GS/NH/NT bands) apply rather than private-sector compensation, and clearance timelines are an absolute gate for candidates without prior clearance.

Who Could Help

Useful helpers include clearance-process advisors and veterans'-transition counselors (Hill is a recognized veteran-friendly hiring environment), the Utah Department of Workforce Services (which partners with Hill on Direct Hire Authority trade-occupation recruiting), defense-contractor partners who supplement the civilian workforce on-base, and university engineering/computer-science pipelines that feed the OO-ALC and 309th recruiting teams directly. For candidates weighing the ethics of the work, current or former engineers who have actually worked on weapons-sustainment programs are more useful than generic career coaches.

Open Questions

Hill's own hill.af.mil fact-sheet pages give inconsistent OO-ALC personnel counts (roughly 7,000, 8,100+, and 9,000+ on three different subpages) (official source) — which is current, and how does it relate to the base-wide total of 26,893?
What share of the base-wide workforce and economic-impact figures is attributable to OO-ALC specifically versus the fighter wings, the 309th, and other tenant units? The base's public reporting is base-wide, not broken out by unit.
How is the Sentinel ICBM ramp expected to change Hill's civilian hiring over the next decade, and how does that connect to Sentinel motor production at Northrop Grumman Promontory?
No hill.af.mil page publishes a single official street address or coordinate for the installation as a whole (it has three public gates, in Layton, Clearfield/Sunset, and Roy); this page therefore omits a map point rather than publish an approximate one that could misrepresent precision.