Mission Operations Engineer, Maritime

Anduril Industries; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries, headquartered in Costa Mesa, CA, seeks a Mission Operations Engineer to lead operational analysis for unmanned and autonomous systems. You will brief senior leaders, embed with warfighters, and translate field results into actionable roadmaps while coordinating with product, engineering, and program teams.

You will travel up to 50% across facilities and sites to ensure plans stay grounded in warfighting realities and customer needs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in maritime, undersea, or autonomous systems mission areas.
• 5+ years maritime operational planning at unit/strike group level.
• Experience with AUV capabilities or autonomous systems in water space.
• Ability to brief and defend operational objectives before senior leaders.
• Decompose ambiguous operational problems into structured executable strategies.
• Strong understanding of maritime missions and threat-informed planning.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for executive briefings.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% and maintain active U.S. Secret clearance.

Responsibilities

• Represent the operational perspective in cross-functional reviews, gate decisions, and portfolio planning cycles.
• Partner with systems analysts, engineers, operators, program directors, and business-line leaders to ensure solutions stay aligned to warfighting needs.
• Convert results from at-sea demonstrations, field tests, and program execution into portfolio-level lessons that influence the roadmap.
• Understand enterprise mission analysis for the maritime portfolio and communicate capabilities and priorities to the customer.
• Develop and refine concepts of operation, employment, and use cases for current and future systems.
• Inform capability roadmaps, IRAD and investment prioritization with operational arguments.
• Analyze threat environments and translate context into capability priorities for product teams.
• Compare alternative approaches and assess trade-offs in mission utility, feasibility, and cost.

Skills

Maritime operations

Operational planning

Mission analysis

Executive briefings

Stakeholder influence

Travel readiness

Security clearance

Cross-functional collaboration

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

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.

ABOUT THE JOB

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 briefed 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.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• 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 warfighting 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 maintain a coherent picture of them across programs rather than one program at a time and be able to communicate them to the customer across the Maritime suite of products
• Develop and refine concepts of operation, concepts of employment, operational vignettes, mission threads, and use cases for current and future systems, and keep them current as designs and customer priorities move
• Inform capability roadmaps, IRAD and investment prioritization, and product-market fit assessments by making the operational case for where the next dollar and the next engineer should go
• Analyze threat environments, customer missions, force structure, operational constraints, and campaign-level context, and translate that context into capability priorities and defensible requirements for product and engineering teams
• Compare alternative capability approaches and assess trade-offs in mission utility, feasibility, scalability, cost, survivability, and operational relevance — including the approaches we should decline to pursue

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 8+ years of experience supporting maritime, undersea, or autonomous systems mission areas; experience across air, surface, C2, ISR, fires, or logistics is also valued
• 5+ years of maritime operational planning experience - building, staffing, and executing operational or campaign plans in the maritime domain at a unit, strike group, numbered fleet, MOC, or component command level
• Experience tactically employing AUV capabilities or equivalent autonomous system experience including water space coordination in the undersea domain
• Demonstrated ability to brief and defend operational objectives, and platform capabilities and limitations in front of senior military and civilian decision-makers - Commanding Officers, high-level civilians, and corporate executives - including under direct and skeptical questioning
• Ability to decompose ambiguous operational problems into structured executable strategies at the tactical level
• Strong understanding of maritime missions, operational concepts, threat-informed planning, and the relationship between technology and warfighting outcomes
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce executive-level briefings
• Demonstrated ability to influence decisions across technical, operational, and business stakeholders without owning them - this role earns its authority through the quality of its analysis
• Ability to hold a portfolio-level view: comfort working several programs, mission areas, and time horizons in parallel and prioritizing among them
• Strong judgment, intellectual curiosity, and comfort operating with incomplete information in a fast-paced environment
• Ability to translate between customer language, operational need, product strategy, and engineering implications
• Willingness to travel up to 50% to multiple company facilities, test and demonstration sites, customer locations, and at-sea or field events
• Currently possesses and is able to maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Watch floor experience - TAO, watch officer, battle watch captain, or equivalent time in a maritime operations center, fleet or component watch floor, or afloat