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.
We are looking for a Head of Engineering to join our rapidly growing team in Reston, VA. In this role, you must be a technical leader with the expertise to evaluate, qualify, manage, and advocate for an increasing number of sophisticated parallel pursuits. This role is crucial in ensuring that each initiative aligns with the company's strategic direction and receives the appropriate resourcing, balancing innovation with practical execution to drive the business line's success. You will be required to learn technical concepts and employ them quickly. You will be expected to use your technical knowledge in conjunction with your program management skills to lead cross-functional efforts and deliver the best outcome for Anduril and the customer. Deploying our capabilities requires thorough understanding of mission requirements, thoughtful orchestration between Anduril teams and external stakeholders, and meticulous planning in the face of ambiguity. You thrive in the unknown and create order out of the chaos.
WHAT YOU'LL DO- Stakeholder Engagement: Build and maintain relationships with internal stakeholders, external clients, and industry partners to gather insights, align objectives, and secure buy-in for strategic initiatives. Act as the primary technical liaison for the client, partnering with the account lead to advocate for their needs within the engineering organization and ensuring their feedback directly influences the requirements generation process. Communicate the outputs of these efforts including upcoming software releases, new capabilities, and performance improvement over time.
- Technical Ownership: Drive technical outcomes through meticulous understanding of system performance, managing incident response and after-action, using metrics to derive insights into areas for improvement, quantifying the improvements made through investment in those areas, and maintaining a clear understanding of the state of the system that can be communicated to the customer.
- Strategic Planning and Execution: Translate strategic business goals into actionable project plans, setting clear milestones, and driving initiatives from conception through to successful completion, ensuring they deliver intended outcomes and add value to the business. Oversee the allocation of personnel, budget, and other resources to ensure successful execution of these initiatives.
- Execute Autonomously: Autonomously execute on broad and/or ambiguous requirements from external clients. Demonstrate high ownership on all pieces of work. Become a trusted partner to Anduril’s engineers.
- Enable Cross Team Collaboration: Manage, unblock, and accelerate cross-team projects spanning multiple teams and initiatives. Collaborate closely with other partner teams, such as hardware, product, and test operations as needed.
- Shape Growth Opportunities: Support the drafting of technical proposals, ensuring that potential projects and scaling opportunities with each account are accurately scoped, resourced, and aligned with the organization's capabilities and strategic goals.
- Proven customer-facing technical program management and/or systems engineering experience, preferably in the defense, national security, or aerospace domains.
- Proven experience leading a technical team of peers to field hardware or software products to real operating environments.
- Solid technical aptitude and an ability to understand technical designs, software development lifecycle, challenges and risks; ability to work closely and effectively with engineering teams.
- Ability to work with internal and external stakeholders, across a wide range of technical comfort.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Must be able to travel up to 25% of the time.
- Currently possesses and is able to maintain an active U.S. Top Secret SCI security clearance.
- MS or PhD in engineering, computer science, or related field preferred.
- Strong technical, analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive decisions.
- Experience in rolling out potentially disruptive organizational process changes.
- Strong technical, analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive decisions.
The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Anduril's total compensation package. Additionally, Anduril offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:
Healthcare Benefits
- US Roles: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans at little to no cost to you.
- UK & AUS Roles: We cover full cost of medical insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
- IE Roles: We offer an annual contribution toward your private health insurance for you and your dependents.
Additional Benefits
- Income Protection: Anduril covers life and disability insurance for all employees.
- Generous time off: Highly competitive PTO plans with a holiday hiatus in December. Caregiver & Wellness Leave is available to care for family members, bond with a new baby, or address your own medical needs.
- Family Planning & Parenting Support: Coverage for fertility treatments (e.g., IVF, preservation), adoption, and gestational carriers, along with resources to support you and your partner from planning to parenting.
- Mental Health Resources: Access free mental health resources 24/7, including therapy and life coaching. Additional work-life services, such as legal and financial support, are also available.
- Professional Development: Annual reimbursement for professional development
- Commuter Benefits: Company-funded commuter benefits based on your region.
- Relocation Assistance: Available depending on role eligibility.
Retirement Savings Plan
- US Roles: Traditional 401(k), Roth, and after-tax (mega backdoor Roth) options.
- UK & IE Roles: Pension plan with employer match.
- AUS Roles: Superannuation plan.
The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.
To view Anduril's candidate data privacy policy, please visit https://anduril.com/applicant-privacy-notice/.
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What We Do
Anduril is a defense products company. Unlike most defense companies, we don’t wait for our customers to tell us what they need. We identify problems, privately fund our R&D and sell finished products off the shelf. Ideas are turned into deployed capabilities in months, not years.
Why Work With Us
Thinkers and doers working interdependently. We bring the brightest minds and best-in-class talent together with veterans who have lived the problems of our warfighters.
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