DFx Engineer, Mechanical & Fluid Systems

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's Air Dominance & Strike (AD&S) Manufacturing Engineering team is seeking a Staff DFx Engineer to serve as the technical authority on design for manufacturability, assembly, and cost across our mechanical, structural, thermal management, and fluid systems (fuel, hydraulics, pneumatics) subsystems. This role spans our full portfolio of autonomous aircraft, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions — ensuring that every design decision accounts for how hardware will be built, by whom, and at what cost.
You will bring deep specialty expertise in at least one — and ideally two — of the following domains: mechanical structures and assemblies, thermal/heat transfer systems, or fluid systems including fuel, hydraulic, and pneumatic architectures. Your primary focus areas are manufacturability, assembly, and cost — the three lenses that determine whether a design can be produced at rate, by a qualified supplier, at an affordable price point.

You are not reviewing designs in the abstract; you are shaping them to be buildable.
A critical part of this role is working directly with subject matter expert (SME) manufacturing engineers and design engineers to evaluate producibility and drive design improvements. You will also play a key role in the selection and qualification of contract manufacturers — assessing supplier capabilities against DFx requirements and ensuring that external production partners can deliver to the quality, rate, and cost targets our programs demand.

This is an inherently cross-functional role: you will work daily with supply chain, quality, operations, and program teams in addition to ME and DE.

• Own and drive DFx analysis across mechanical, structural, thermal, and fluid systems subsystems for AD&S programs, with a primary focus on manufacturability, assembly, and cost.
• Lead structured DFM/DFA/DFC reviews at key design milestones, applying rigorous scoring to identify producibility and cost risks and drive design changes before they reach production.
• Lead/facilitate DFMEAs with cross-functional teams. Use FMEA outputs to drive design changes, inspection strategies, and control plans.
• Work directly with SME manufacturing engineers and design engineers to evaluate designs, translate manufacturing constraints into actionable feedback, and negotiate design trades that balance performance, producibility, and cost.
• Assist in the selection and qualification of contract manufacturers for machined components, fabrications, composite structures, thermal management hardware, and fluid system assemblies — assessing supplier manufacturing capability, process maturity, and cost competitiveness against DFx requirements.
• Conduct supplier manufacturing assessments including facility reviews, process audits, and capability evaluations to determine readiness for production qualification.
• Develop and maintain should-cost models and cost-driver analyses for mechanical and fluid system assemblies, identifying design changes that reduce unit cost without…