Perception Systems Engineer

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.

Anduril is seeking a Systems Engineer to support perception system development for the Maneuver Dominance, Enabling Technology team. The Maneuver Dominance (MD) Team at Anduril develops aerial robotic systems designed to operate in large coordinated teams in concert with ground maneuver forces.

Perception is what allows an autonomous aircraft to understand the world immediately around it and act on what it finds there. Delivering that is a sensing problem first. The system spans multiple sensor modalities, the apertures and fields of regard those sensors are installed into, the compute that runs them, and the calibration and timing that turn several sensors into one coherent picture of the world.

It is developed once, in ET, and inherited by every MD program that needs it.

You will be a key technical leader for that system, and the center of gravity of the role is the sensing suite itself: which sensors are in the baseline and why, what the system is required to detect, at what range, and in what conditions, how that is proven, and what evidence a receiving program gets when the capability transitions onto their aircraft.

You will lead this across several concurrent efforts, including in-house sensor development with partner engineering teams elsewhere in Anduril, and new sensing work as the portfolio grows. You will work with Perception Engineering leadership to set the technical objectives for the sensing suite, and own what correct means and how it is demonstrated.

This is a role with depth at its center and reach at its edges. We are hiring for someone who has demonstrated experience making sensing systems work on real vehicles, and whose judgment about where sensing is going carries weight well beyond this team.

• Drive the perception system architecture and requirements baseline: decompose mission need into detection, range, field of regard, latency, and availability requirements, allocate them across sensing, compute, and algorithms, and keep them traceable through to test evidence
• Own the sensor suite baseline and its configuration across platforms, including which modalities and part numbers are in the baseline for each aircraft variant, where they are installed, and the interfaces to the programs and airframes that carry them
• Set and defend the sensing performance model: detection probability and false alarm rate against target size, reflectivity, range, aspect, illumination, and weather, built up from radiometry and detector performance, and reconciled against measured flight test results
• Drive the verification and validation strategy for perception: verification plans, bench and hardware in the loop coverage, sensor characterization test, flight test objectives, data collection needs, and the evidence package that demonstrates a capability is ready to graduate onto a program aircraft
• Provide the technical authority at design and gate reviews, judging whether perception evidence is sufficient and coverage is complete, and holding the line when…