Senior Product Manager, Forward Deployed

Anduril Industries; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 166,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grants

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

Anduril Industries is seeking a Forward Deployed Product Manager who embeds with military units to translate warfighter problems into fielded solutions. You will own outcomes across applications, data models, UX, integrations, and infrastructure while building trust with operators and engineers.

You will map workflows, drive prioritization, and ensure deployments actually improve mission effectiveness, with a strong emphasis on field feedback and reusable patterns across programs.

Qualifications

• Active eligibility for U.S. Secret clearance.
• 4–8 years in product management or service design, or equivalent.
• Ability to translate technical and domain information into CONOPS and feature definitions.
• Experience doing research and synthesis with users and SMEs; roadmap creation.
• History of earning trust with non-technical, operational users and partners.
• Ability to balance needs across engineering, data, and business stakeholders.
• Comfort working with a wide range of technical backgrounds and willingness to learn systems.
• Strong facilitation and whiteboarding skills; lead planning and decomposition sessions.
• Ability to perform basic design work in common tools such as Figma.
• Strong organizational skills and reliability.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time.

Responsibilities

• Own warfighter outcomes from problem to fielded solution across apps, data models, UX, integrations, and infra.
• Build real relationships with warfighters, commanders, staff, and SMEs to understand how units fight.
• Conduct field research; observe workflows and turn insights into clear priorities.
• Map users, decisions, workflows, data, and dependencies to guide what gets built and integrated.
• Design across the stack; determine if changes are needed in apps, data models, integrations, or workflows.
• Leverage data models to support workflows and outcomes.
• Design for the tactical edge, accounting for degraded networks, bandwidth, latency, and compute.
• Gather stakeholders across units to drive one coherent solution.
• Create actionable strategies and decisions during workshops and design sessions.
• Brief stakeholders clearly, tailoring detail to audience.
• Prototype ideas with users before heavy engineering spend.
• Follow through during fielding to validate effectiveness and collect feedback.
• Identify reusable patterns across units and programs.

Skills

Secret clearance eligibility

Product management

Narrative/conops translation

User research & synthesis

Trust-building with operators

Stakeholder balancing

Cross-functional collaboration

Facilitation & whiteboarding

Figma design

Organization & reliability

Travel up to 50%

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 Mission Command team is part of the Connected Warfare Division. We build the command and control (C2) tools that help warfighters understand what is happening around them, make faster decisions, and direct their forces. We spend a lot of our time with the people who actually use these tools: in the field, during exercises, wherever they are.

About The Role

This is not a product manager who happens to spend some time forward. The forward work is the product work. As a Forward Deployed Product Manager, you own the path from a warfighter problem to a fielded solution. That covers applications, data models, user experiences, integrations, and infrastructure. Most of all, you work as a translation layer between the warfighter and the engineering teams. You embed with units, build real expertise in how they fight, and earn enough trust that influence runs both ways. You are there to solve their problems, not to sell them something, and you build an open, trusting relationship by doing exactly that. Sometimes an introduction is made for you. You have to be comfortable with walking into a unit that has never heard of Lattice, and earn your footing from the bottom up. The profile we are hiring for: a product manager who can walk into a formation, understand the fight, earn the trust of the people in it, map the workflow and the data underneath it, and then pull the right parts of Anduril together to solve it. You walk in with a strong sense of ownership and responsibility, but you back it up with real curiosity and humility.

What You’ll Do

• Own warfighter outcomes, not features. Embed with units, learn the mission, find the problems that matter most, and own them through development, fielding, and the work that comes after.
• Build real relationships with the people in the fight. Earn the trust of warfighters, commanders, staff, and subject matter experts. Become a partner who understands how the unit actually fights, not just what shows up in a requirements document.
• Do the research in the field. Learn by watching, asking questions, and taking part in real workflows. Turn what you learn into clear priorities.
• Connect the fight to the product. Map the users, decisions, workflows, systems, data, and dependencies behind an outcome, and use that to drive what gets built and integrated.
• Design across the whole stack. Do not default to a new app or a new screen. Work out whether an outcome needs an application change, a new or richer data model, an integration, a workflow that spans applications, or a change in how data moves across the Mesh.
• Use the data model as a product tool. Get to know what data exists, how it is represented, where it comes from, who uses it, and what has to change to make a workflow possible.
• Design for the tactical edge. Understand how the network and the hardware affect what the user sees and does. Account for degraded conditions, bandwidth, latency, and compute when you define a solution.
• Pull the right people together. Get warfighters, engineering, design, and the other teams around the same problem, and drive them toward one coherent answer.
• Make ambiguous problems workable. Be just as comfortable writing a strategy, sketching a workflow, working through a data flow with an engineer, or standing at a whiteboard with the people who will use the product.
• Run the room. Lead workshops, working groups, and design sessions. Get useful information out of a room, settle competing views, and leave with decisions and next steps.
• Brief well and tell the story. Communicate clearly to a few operators, to a large room, and to senior leadership. Adjust the level of detail for the audience without losing the substance.
• Prototype before you spend engineering time. Test ideas quickly with users so you get to the right answer faster.
• Stay with it through fielding. Watch whether the solution actually helps the mission, find where it breaks under real conditions, and feed that straight back into the product.
• Look past the single request. Spot the patterns that can become reusable across units and programs, instead of building a one-off every time.

Who You Are

• Bias for Action. You ask for forgiveness, not permission, and you hate waiting around to be told what to do.
• Outcome-Oriented. You figure out what the business needs and work backward from there.
• Customer Focused. You have real empathy for users and build things they actually want to use.
• Dive Deep. You sweat the details and get into the weeds to find the root cause of a problem.
• Ownership. You care about your products and about everything the business depends on them for. You hold yourself accountable for what your systems do and for what they fail to do.
• Agility. You change direction without drama when the priorities change.
• First Principles Thinking. You solve problems based on what is actually best here, not because a vendor recommended it or because it is how your last company did it.

Required Qualifications

• Eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret clearance.
• 4 to 8 years in product management, product scope definition, or service design, or an equivalent record of turning hard user problems into fielded solutions.
• A track record of translating technical and domain-specific information into narratives, CONOPS, mission threads, and feature definitions.
• Experience doing research and synthesis with users and SMEs, and building a roadmap from what you learn.
• A history of earning trust with non-technical, operational users and partnering with them, not just collecting their requirements.
• The ability to balance needs across engineering, data, and business stakeholders.
• Comfort working with people across a wide range of technical backgrounds, and the willingness to learn technical systems well enough to use them in your product decisions.
• Strong facilitation and whiteboarding skills, including leading interactive planning and decomposition sessions.
• The ability to do your own design work in common tools such as Figma.
• Strong organizational skills and reliability.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time, including to field and training environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Military experience, or direct experience working alongside operational military units, with a feel for how a unit fights and for Army staff processes, TTPs, and doctrine.
• A range of product experience across internal tools, customer-facing applications, and tools for technical users.
• Working knowledge of data models, system integrations, networking, or distributed and edge systems, enough to reason about data flows and network constraints.
• A self-starter who does well with ambiguity and loose organizational structure.
• Experience fielding capabilities and improving them based on real operational feedback.

US Salary Range

$166,000—$220,000 USD

Benefits

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.

Data Privacy

To view Anduril's candidate data privacy policy, please visit https://anduril.com/applicant-privacy-notice/. By submitting your application, you consent to Anduril Industries using a third-party service provider to conduct pre-employment risk, integrity, and due diligence screening and assessing potential risks as part of your application process. This third-party service provider provides risk‑intelligence services that may include analysis of sanctions and watchlists, adverse media, public-record information, and other lawful open-source or commercial data sources. This third-party service provider does not act as a consumer reporting agency. Use of this provider helps to ensure compliance with applicable laws and protect technology, intellectual property, and organizational security.