Mission Operations Lead, Maritime

Anduril; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries, headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, seeks a Mission Operations Lead to shape maritime capability deployment. You will brief senior leaders, craft operational arguments, and embed with warfighters to deliver real-time feedback on Anduril products.

The role requires translating operational problems into defensible roadmaps, coordinating with product, engineering, and program teams, and presenting clear outcomes to executives.

Qualifications

• Maritime operational planning experience at unit, strike group, or fleet level.
• Experience briefing senior military and civilian leadership.
• Willingness to travel up to 50%.

Responsibilities

• Understand enterprise-level mission analysis for the maritime portfolio.
• Develop and refine concepts of operation and employment.
• Inform capability roadmaps and investment prioritization.
• Analyze threat environments and translate context to priorities.
• Compare approaches and assess trade-offs for mission utility.
• Convert demonstrations into portfolio-level lessons.
• Partner with analysts, engineers, and managers to align with warfighting needs.
• Represent operational perspective in reviews and portfolio planning cycles.
• Serve as interpreter between customer language and product strategy.

Skills

Maritime ops planning

Executive briefing

Threat analysis

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 Lead to do that work at the enterprise level, based at our Costa Mesa, California headquarters.

ABOUT THE JOB

Our next Mission Operations Lead 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

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 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 co