I second this comment. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career at JPL as well. My first project out of college was writing testing support tools for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Project. I sat 10 feet from a small window into the Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF Building 179). Got to watch the rovers take their first steps. Got to do a ton of interesting things, from Satellite Radio Software Stack Testing (QA), to Project Planning Systems, to first steps into Cloud Computing. Got to fill out forms that placed some of my work into the National Archives.

Also don't forget there's other FFRDCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...) in the US.