Director of Operations, Hardware Engineering

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century’s most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.
As the Engineering Operations Director, you will work directly with the VP of Hardware Engineering and lead an engineering operations team to build and run business operations across the Hardware Engineering Organization. The Hardware Engineering organization is the central engineering organization across Anduril that upholds the bar of engineering excellence, provides core engineering services, and develops strategic core technology products for hardware development across Anduril. In this role, you will partner with hardware engineering org leadership and teams from across the organization and company — spanning our business lines and divisions to our Finance and G&A teams to our core internal operations teams — to unpack ambiguous problems and build lasting, scalable solutions. Your work will vary from quick-turn operational fire-fighting, building and redesigning processes, to leading high-impact strategic projects. Your role and team will enable and provide operational leverage to the engineering organization that underpins and differentiates Anduril as the next generation defense prime.
Here’s what you’ll do:

• Partner with the VP of Hardware Engineering and their leadership team to drive and execute strategy for organizational development that will scale and meet engineering needs across Anduril divisions.
• Define the org vision, org operating model, and annual goals
• Determine investments for engineering capabilities and technology development
• Set and track metrics for organizational health and performance on engineering deliverables
• Execute on strategic initiatives and take on special projects for the organization
• Drive day-to-day operations and develop internal processes/frameworks for efficient operations of the Hardware Engineering org. This would include staffing/hiring, org communications, performance management/compensation, seating/facilities, financial tracking, etc. and working with cross functional partners across these domains. Specific examples include:
• Manage the hardware engineering org budget in partnership with a FP&A partner to track financial health of budget against goals and deliverables.
• Support tactical staffing assignments in service of critical business line needs.
• Track headcount for the org and work with recruiting to prioritize open roles and determine hiring strategies needed for rapid scaling.
• Drive annual planning for the Hardware Engineering organization as part of the corporate planning cycle.
• Work with corporate technology to build the underlying data and system infrastructure for organizational operations - Confluence spaces, Jira systems, data drives, etc.
• Manage organizational communications internal to the team and external across the company, such as sending monthly update emails across the company and preparing team wide All Hands.
• Lead a small (2-3) Engineering Operations team to support day to day org tactical operations and strategic initiatives within the org engineering departments.
• Engage with Anduril executive leadership as a leadership representative for the Hardware Engineering organization to report risks and developments within the organization and to prepare content and present at Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).

Required Qualifications:

• Undergraduate degree in an engineering major
• 8+ years of working experience with minimum 2+ years in a technical engineering role and 2+ years in a consulting, operations, finance, product management, or general business analysis role.
• A strong communicator across a wide dynamic range - Ability to translate and articulate thoughts clearly and simply across a wide range of roles (working level engineers, finance partners, recruiters, cross functional leadership, and executives).
• Experience interfacing with leadership and executives - you understand how to cultivate trust and facilitate meetings for and engage with executives.
• Strong emotional intelligence and ability to solve operational problems not only from a data driven lens, but also in a people-centric way by building strong cross functional relationships across the company and within the hardware engineering organization.
• Combination ability to execute on a tactical level as well as put together a strategy to solve complex, ambiguous, cross-functional problems. You are comfortable rolling up your sleeves and diving deep into executing operational tasks that require high attention to detail and high organization skills, but you can also zoom out at a 30,000 foot level to create a strategy that solves high level problems for the org and the company.
• High ownership with the horsepower to juggle multiple (3-5+) large projects and priorities in parallel, at a rapid pace, and report out on progress regularly without dropping any balls.
• Discerning and an incredibly fast learner
• Ability to obtain and hold a US Top Secret clearance e