After the U.S. entry into World War II, Ross made her way to California and was hired as a mathematician at the Lockheed Aircraft Company. Her initial work at Lockheed included examining the effects of pressure on the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft. This P-38 was the first military plane to travel faster than 400 miles per hour in level flight, and Ross’s job entailed addressing numerous design issues potentially undermining that aircraft’s aeroelasticity and level of speed.

In 1952, she became one of 40 engineers to participate in a then-secret initiative collectively called Lockheed Advanced Development Projects. Ross was the only woman and also the only Native American involved in this effort, which formulated concepts and blueprints for everything from possible travel into outer space to both manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights.

“Often at night there were four of us working until 11 p.m.,” Ross later recounted. “I was the pencil pusher, doing a lot of research. My state of the art tools were a slide rule and a Frieden computer. We were taking the theoretical and making it real.”

Ross retired in 1973, and she spent much of the remaining decades of her life helping to promote careers in engineering among Native American youth. A large part of this advocacy involved working closely with both the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) to further build up their respective educational programs.