Mission Operations Engineer, Maritime

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.

At Anduril, we are developing unmanned systems for subsurface, surface, land, and air domains that will leverage unsupervised autonomy for the delivery of multi-mission capability to our customers. Deciding what to build — and in what order — requires people who can connect operational problems, threat-informed scenarios, customer needs, and product employment concepts to the capability we field. We are looking for a Mission Operations Engineer to do that work at the enterprise level, based at our Costa Mesa, California headquarters.

Our next Mission Operations Engineer has built and executed plans in the maritime domain, has stood watch, and has been to sea, preferably using uncrewed systems. That background is what separates an analytic product that operators recognize as real from one that reads well and gets ignored. Equally important is the ability to carry that work into a room of senior military and civilian decision-makers and hold it there: this role briefs Commanding Officers, high-level civilians, and our own executive team, and it is expected to give direct answers under hard questioning.

Customer engagement is key, with opportunity to embed directly with our warfighters to provide real-time analysis and feedback on Anduril products. You will normalize how mission problems are framed so that competing programs can be compared on the same terms, and so that investment, roadmap, and capture decisions rest on a defensible operational argument rather than on whichever program brieflyed most recently.

Being co-located with product leadership, engineering leads, growth, and program directors is the point of the job. You will spend your days in the rooms where trades get made: pressure-testing a concept of employment with the engineers who have to build it, reconciling a program director’s field reality with a product lead’s roadmap, and giving executives the one-page operational case they need to commit capital.

Expect up to 50% travel across company facilities, test and demonstration sites, waterfront and fleet concentration areas, and customer locations — the analysis has to survive contact with the water, not just the whiteboard.

• Represent the operational perspective in cross-functional reviews, gate decisions, and portfolio planning cycles, and serve as a trusted interpreter between customer language, operational need, product strategy, and engineering implications
• Partner with systems analysts, engineers, operators, program directors, and business-line leaders to ensure technical solutions remain anchored to real war fighting needs as programs mature
• Convert results from at-sea demonstrations, field test events, and program execution into portfolio-level lessons that change what we build, closing the loop between the deck plate and the roadmap
• Understand the enterprise-level mission analysis for the maritime portfolio — identify operational problems, capability gaps, and opportunities for differentiated system employment, and…