Deputy Program Chief Engineer

Anduril; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries in California seeks an Air Defense Technical Program Manager to lead cross-functional efforts across hardware and software, aligning initiatives with strategic goals and ensuring proper resourcing.

You will own technical outcomes, manage incidents, collaborate with engineering, product, and test operations, and travel up to 50% as needed to support customers and field deployments.

Qualifications

• Proven customer-facing technical program management experience.
• Proven experience leading a technical team to field hardware or software in real environments.
• Strong ability to understand technical designs and work with engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Stakeholder engagement with internal and external partners to align objectives and secure buy-in.
• Technical ownership: manage system performance, incident response, and metrics-driven improvements.
• Strategic planning and execution: translate goals into actionable plans and allocate resources.
• Execute autonomously on broad/ambiguous requirements from external clients.
• Enable cross-team collaboration with hardware, product, and test operations.
• Shape growth opportunities by drafting technically scoped proposals for scaling opportunities.

Skills

Customer-facing PM

Systems engineering

Engineering collaboration

Excellent communication

Security clearance

Willing to travel

Education

BS in engineering or CS

Tools

JIRA

Confluence

Job description

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.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Air Defense team builds robots that find other robots and knock them out of the sky. At a time when air superiority can no longer be taken for granted, the Air Defense team provides mission critical capabilities to warfighters. From detection to tracking, identification, deterrence, and defeat, our family of networked sensors and effectors enables our customers to rapidly close the kill chain against a broad range of UAS threats. Working across product, engineering, business development, logistics, operations, and mission success, the Air Defense team develops, tests, deploys, and sustains the Anduril Air Defense Family of Systems in challenging operational environments worldwide.

ABOUT THE JOB

As an Air Defense TPM, you must be a technical leader with the expertise to evaluate, qualify, manage, and advocate for an increasing number of sophisticated parallel pursuits. This role is crucial in ensuring that each initiative aligns with the company's strategic direction and receives the appropriate resourcing, balancing innovation with practical execution to drive the business line's success. You will be required to learn technical concepts and employ them quickly. You will be expected to use your technical knowledge in conjunction with your program management skills to lead cross-functional efforts and deliver the best outcome for Anduril and the customer. Deploying our Air Defense capabilities requires thorough understanding of mission requirements, thoughtful orchestration between Anduril teams and external stakeholders, and meticulous planning in the face of ambiguity. You thrive in the unknown and create order out of the chaos.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Stakeholder Engagement: Build and maintain relationships with internal stakeholders, external clients, and industry partners to gather insights, align objectives, and secure buy-in for strategic initiatives. Act as the primary technical liaison for the client, partnering with the account lead to advocate for their needs within the engineering organization and ensuring their feedback directly influences the requirements generation process. Communicate the outputs of these efforts including upcoming software releases, new capabilities, and performance improvement over time.
• Technical Ownership: Drive technical outcomes through meticulous understanding of system performance, managing incident response and after-action, using metrics to derive insights into areas for improvement, quantifying the improvements made through investment in those areas, and maintaining a clear understanding of the state of the system that can be communicated to the customer.
• Strategic Planning and Execution: Translate strategic business goals into actionable project plans, setting clear milestones, and driving initiatives from conception through to successful completion, ensuring they deliver intended outcomes and add value to the business. Oversee the allocation of personnel, budget, and other resources to ensure successful execution of these initiatives.
• Execute Autonomously: Autonomously execute on broad and/or ambiguous requirements from external clients. Demonstrate high ownership on all pieces of work. Become a trusted partner to Anduril’s engineers.
• Enable Cross Team Collaboration: Manage, unblock, and accelerate cross-team projects spanning multiple teams and initiatives. Collaborate closely with other partner teams, such as hardware, product, and test operations as needed.
• Shape Growth Opportunities: Support the drafting of technical proposals, ensuring that potential projects and scaling opportunities with each account are accurately scoped, resourced, and aligned with the organization's capabilities and strategic goals.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Proven customer-facing technical program management and/or systems engineering experience, preferably in the defense, national security, or aerospace domains
• Proven experience leading a technical team of peers to field hardware or software products to real operating environments
• Solid technical aptitude and an ability to understand technical designs, software development lifecycle, challenges and risks; ability to work closely and effectively with engineering teams.
• Ability to work with internal and external stakeholders, across a wide range of technical comfort
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Must be able to obtain a Secret Clearance.
• Must be able to travel up to 50% of the time

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, computer science, or related field preferred
• Strong technical, analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive decisions
• Experience in rolling out potentially disruptive organizational process changes
• Strong technical, analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive decisions
• Experience with tools like JIRA and Confluence

The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Anduril's total compensation package. Additionally, Anduril offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

At Anduril, we invest in our people. Our comprehensive, competitive benefits package (available at little to no cost to employees) ensures you’re supported in health, recovery, and whatever comes next. For more information, Explore Our Benefits .

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