Mission Systems Lead - Thunder

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.

The Maneuver Dominance team at Anduril develops operationally relevant, multi-asset autonomy. Thunder is Anduril’s Group 5 autonomous tilt‑rotor platform. Anduril’s Mission Systems are integrated onto Archer Aviation’s eVTOL platform, combining the speed, range, and vertical takeoff and landing capability of advanced electric aircraft with Anduril’s autonomy, sensing, and command‑and‑control software. Announced at the Farnborough Airshow, Thunder represents a strategic co-development partnership between Anduril and Archer, pairing a proven commercial eVTOL airframe with a battle‑tested autonomy stack to deliver a runway‑independent, uncrewed platform capable of operating across contested and austere environments.

Thunder extends Anduril’s Lattice ecosystem to a new class of air vehicle, unlocking rapid, scalable production of a distributed, multi‑mission autonomous aircraft built for both defense and commercial applications.

Anduril is seeking an engineering leader to join the Maneuver Dominance team at our Costa Mesa HQ. The Maneuver Dominance (MD) Team at Anduril develops aerial robotic systems designed to operate in large coordinated teams in concert with ground maneuver forces. We leverage existing Anduril drone platforms like Ghost, Altius, or Roadrunner, in addition to bringing 3rd party platforms into Anduril’s Lattice ecosystem.

We develop perception and autonomy algorithms to solve some of the hardest problems facing our customers.

This role has the unique opportunity to bring Thunder’s Mission System to life, from initial concept through delivery. This encompasses the mission autonomy, mission equipment, and payload systems. You will lead the technical development and integration of mission systems of the core Thunder platform. In doing so, you will work closely with program leadership, teams from other Anduril products, and third party system vendors to develop these designs so that requirements are tied to customer inputs and there is traceability to program office technical decisions.

Your spectrum of support will be diverse in nature and require you to leverage your technical expertise as well as leadership skills to set objectives, build cross‑functional teams, and rapidly drive to completion. The ability to leverage your intuition and prior experience will be key in making sure the right design, analysis, and test steps are completed to ensure success. The ideal candidate will leverage their experience executing and successfully completing prior highly optimized multi‑disciplinary projects.

• Own customer success through the design and delivery of a fully operational mission system for a new Maneuver Dominance platform.
• Partner with the Vehicle Software team that is responsible for core sensor, actuator, and vehicle system functionality. Collaborate on interfacing requirements between Vehicle Management System and Mission System stacks.
• Oversee payload system integration with the host vehicle mission system stack.
• Oversee…