Senior Quality Engineer, Applied AI Software

Front Door Defense; Costa Mesa, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 191,000 - 253,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries in Costa Mesa, California, seeks a Senior Quality Engineer, Applied AI, to build and own end-to-end automated system integration tests for production product lines. You will simulate workload and data of a live production environment, and enable engineers on the floor to verify quality themselves.

The role requires advanced expertise in distributed systems, AI tooling, and testing across PLM/ERP/MES/WMS boundaries, with a focus on reliability, observability, and fast feedback

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering or related role in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience building automated integration or end-to-end test suites for production systems.
• Strong fluency in modern architectures, APIs, distributed systems, CI/CD, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with failures crossing system boundaries; strong debugging and incident response instincts.
• Experience with frontier AI tooling or agentic systems and quality challenges they introduce.
• Ability to balance hands-on implementation with systems-level quality strategy.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to influence senior engineers and stakeholders.
• U.S. Person status is required.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own automated system integration tests across multiple systems end-to-end.
• Simulate production workload and data to reflect live factory behavior.
• Leverage AI to author, maintain, and triage tests quickly.
• Trace failures across service, network, and vendor boundaries to root cause.
• Set test strategy, release readiness criteria, and quality gates.
• Build observability, instrumentation, and environment strategy for tests and incidents.
• Partner with engineering and floor teams to move quality upstream into design.
• Contribute in code, infrastructure, and tooling to improve feedback loops.
• Support launch readiness, production issue response, and post-incident follow-through.
• Set the technical standard for testing craft across Mission Control.

Skills

End-to-end testing

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Debugging

AI tooling experience

Cloud infrastructure

Incident response

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Information Systems / Engineering / related field

Tools

Playwright

Infrastructure as code

Cloud platforms

CI pipelines

Job description

Senior Quality Engineer, Applied AI

Build and own end-to-end automated system integration tests for production product lines

Location: Costa Mesa, California

Compensation: $191,000 - 253,000 USD / year

About The Role

Senior Quality Engineer, Applied AI

Costa Mesa, California, United States

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 Job:

Mission Control is the team responsible for quality assurance, release management, and incident management across the systems Anduril's factories run on. When a product line moves from design to a finished article, it crosses PLM, ERP, MES, and WMS, and the seams between them are where quality is won or lost. This role is the senior technical anchor for proving those seams hold. You will build the automated system integration tests that exercise real product lines end to end, simulate the workload and data of a live production environment, and make it possible for the engineers and operators closest to the work to verify quality themselves.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and own automated system integration tests that exercise Anduril product lines end to end across multiple systems, rather than validating single services in isolation.
• Simulate production workload and data for those product lines so tests reflect what the factory actually does, and build mechanisms that detect when the simulation drifts from reality.
• Leverage AI to author, maintain, and triage tests faster, and turn that into capability for others so the people closest to the problems can ensure quality themselves.
• Reason about distributed architecture and reconcile intent, implementation, and observed production reality, tracing failures across service, network, and vendor boundaries to the actual cause.
• Set test strategy, release readiness criteria, and quality gates for the release train, and make them fast enough that teams choose to use them.
• Build the observability, instrumentation, and environment strategy that turn a failing test or a production incident into a clear, actionable signal.
• Partner with the engineering teams that own the systems under test, and with business partners on the floor, to move quality upstream into design and acceptance criteria.
• Contribute directly in code, infrastructure, and tooling to improve developer feedback loops, test reliability, and production stability.
• Support launch readiness, production issue response, root cause analysis, and post-incident follow-through, with a bias toward eliminating classes of failure rather than repeatedly reacting to them.
• Set the technical standard for testing craft across Mission Control through review, pairing, and example, without becoming a bottleneck or a bureaucracy.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, software development engineering in test, site reliability engineering, quality engineering, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related role in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating automated integration or end-to-end test suites for production systems, including ownership of environments, test data, and CI execution.
• Strong technical fluency in modern software architectures, APIs, distributed systems, CI/CD, and cloud or platform infrastructure.
• Experience reasoning about failures that cross system boundaries, with strong debugging, root cause analysis, and incident response instincts.
• Experience working with frontier AI tooling, AI coding assistants, or agentic systems, including awareness of the quality and reliability challenges these systems introduce.
• Ability to move between hands-on implementation and systems-level quality strategy, with sound judgment on where rigor is required versus where speed is appropriate.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence senior engineers, cross-functional stakeholders, and business partners on quality and reliability trade-offs.
• Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• U.S. Person status is required as this position needs to access export controlled data.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience testing enterprise or manufacturing systems such as ERP, MES, WMS, PLM, or CRM, particularly workflows that span several of them.
• Experience generating or anonymizing production-like data and load for test environments, and detecting drift between test assumptions and production behavior.
• Experience with modern browser and API automation frameworks such as Playwright, along with strategies for keeping large suites fast and non-flaky.
• Experience supporting AI-first or AI-accelerated engineering teams, including designing quality controls around non-deterministic system behavior.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, cloud platforms, observability stacks, release engineering, and production operations.
• Experience in hyper growth startup-like environments, with demonstrated success balancing speed, ambiguity, and engineering rigor.
• Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance.

US Salary Range

$191,000 - $253,000 USD

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: