Senior Software Engineer, RAIL

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 Robot Autonomy Interface Layer (RAIL) team bridges the gap between low-level hardware and advanced AI-driven behaviors  believe that taking a platform approach in an industry that historically has shared very little software between products is a critical piece of Anduril’s competitive advantage.

RAIL has two primary customers:

• Mission Autonomy (MA) — Mission Autonomy at Anduril is responsible for coordinating mission-level behaviors by manipulating hardware. For example, “fly to these waypoints,” “enter radio silence mode,” or “arm munitions.”
• Robotics Business Lines — These teams own specific Anduril robots end-to-end, as well as individual pieces of hardware on those robots.

RAIL bridges the gap between Mission Autonomy and diverse sets of hardware by creating common hardware interfaces. To allow Anduril to effortlessly integrate with new hardware. RAIL enables Anduril to scale and deploy ambitious new robot designs on short timelines by leveraging learnings and investments from our existing portfolio of diverse hardware and products.

For example, Anduril procures autopilots from a multitude of different hardware vendors. Each autopilot has a subtly different hardware interface — some use MAVLINK, some use STANAG, others use bespoke vendor-specific serial interfaces. Despite having different interfaces, they all provide standard functionality that flies along a set of waypoints.

As an author of advanced mission behavior, I shouldn’t care whether my autopilot speaks MAVLINK or STANAG — I just want my vehicle to get flying. RAIL abstracts away these subtle hardware differences from Mission Autonomy by providing a shared, common interface as a layer between Mission Autonomy and low-level hardware integrations. RAIL also provides other valuable features such as hardware custody management and access-control semantics, shared-memory IPC approaches and flexible observability plugins, to name a few.

RAIL is uniquely situated within Anduril. As the layer between Mission Autonomy and low-level-hardware at Anduril, you will find yourself developing a broad set of expertise working with nearly every robotics team  date, we’ve flown all across our US offices and test sites to launch new initiatives with Ghost, Altius, Dive, and Fury. Come help RAIL build the future of robot autonomy at Anduril!

• Own major feature development and rollout of large features for our products — RAIL works with nearly every robotics team at Anduril — humility, empathy, and strong collaboration skills are key to success on the RAIL team!
• Write and maintain core systems that all robotics platforms at Anduril will use.
• Work closely with our vehicle software teams during product development, understanding their needs, and delivering high leverage software they are able to use bring their product to market.

• 4+ years of C++ or Rust experience in a Linux development environment — you will be expected to learn Rust on the job, but prior Rust experience is not required
• BS in Robotics, Computer Science, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field
• Proven understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and code optimization
• Experience troubleshooting and analyzing remotely deployed software systems
• Experience working with and testing electrical and mechanical systems
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance