Patent and Trademark Office careers
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The USPTO pays for itself. It's a fully fee-funded agency inside the Department of Commerce, granting patents and registering trademarks, and it advises the president through the secretary of commerce on national and international intellectual property policy. More than 14,000 people work there, on the Alexandria, Virginia campus and at the regional outreach and community engagement offices the agency runs across the country.
Patent examiners are the largest group by a distance, hired by technical field, from electrical and mechanical engineering through chemistry and biotechnology. Trademark examining attorneys are the second examining corps, and around both sit the administrative patent judges of the appeal boards, IP policy staff, economists, and the technologists behind the filing systems.