That sounds exactly like my employer, the JHU Applied Physics Lab. We’re a university affiliated research center, so we aren’t tied to the government pay scale and can provide a better career advancement outlook.
We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get tenure, while also getting to push real products out to our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid off because we didn’t meet some growth number for the quarter.