Senior Software Engineer, Mission Simulation

Anduril Industries; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries in Costa Mesa, CA, is building a high-fidelity military simulation platform. You will contribute to core architecture, ECS, and integration, enabling real-time and faster-than-real-time execution for hundreds of entities.

The role emphasizes C++20, large codebases, perf tuning, and API design, with collaboration across GUI, simulation modeling, and backend teams.

Qualifications

• 3 years of professional experience with C++20 and strong C++ skills; comfortable with templates, move semantics, smart pointers, and framework design.
• Experience designing internal APIs and frameworks with backwards-compatibility and ergonomics.
• Strong systems programming fundamentals: memory management, shared libraries, ABI stability, OS interfacing.
• Familiarity with Linux-based C++ development toolchains.
• Ability to reason about performance-sensitive code, cache behavior, and memory layout.
• Clear technical communication in a large codebase and negotiation of architectural decisions.
• Eligibility to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Government Secret security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Model authoring tools integration and UI extension for Mission Sim models with ergonomic API design.
• Develop the core ECS architecture to manage entity lifecycles and components.
• Maintain a versioned C ABI for plugin and SDK support.
• Optimize performance for real-time and faster-than-real-time simulation with many entities.
• Build integration paths: gRPC services, DIS interoperability, networking, and data recording.
• Support domain experts in enhancing capability models.

Skills

C++20

Templates

Move semantics

Smart pointers

ECS architectures

Linux development

Performance optimization

Tools

gRPC

DIS protocol

pybind11

Nix

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 Simulation Platform team owns the core architecture and infrastructure of Anduril's high-fidelity, multi-domain military mission simulator. It models hundreds of entities--aircraft, ships, submarines, satellites, ground vehicles--moving, sensing, communicating, and engaging across realistic physical environments. The simulator powers training, mission planning, autonomy development, and hardware-in-the-loop testing across Anduril's product portfolio. It connects to live systems, integrates with Anduril's Lattice platform, and runs inside a GUI for interactive scenario authoring. Mission Sim is a large, mature C++20 codebase with an Entity-Component-System architecture, a stable C ABI plugin system, embedded scripting, and a variety of physics-based models. Keeping this system fast, correct, extensible, and pleasant to develop against at scale, with a growing team of model developers is our job.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Model authoring tools — an early effort you will help stand up to extend the Sim frontend with UI for authoring and tuning Mission Sim models. You will negotiate extension APIs with the GUI team and build an ergonomic UI atop them, working alongside Simulation Modeling engineers.
• Custom Entity-Component-System architecture that underpins the entire simulator: entity lifecycle, component storage, and the update loop
• Plugin and SDK development - maintaining a versioned C ABI, which enables external teams to extend the simulator
• Performance and scale — keeping the simulation loop fast enough for real-time and faster-than-real-time execution with hundreds of concurrent entities; reasoning about memory layout, cache behavior and contention, as entity counts grow
• Integration architecture — gRPC services, DIS protocol interoperability, networking messaging, and file recording for analysis and playback
• Support domain experts in integrating new and enhancing existing capability models

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 3 years of professional experience with C++20 and strong C++ skills; you should be comfortable with templates, move semantics, smart pointers, and the kinds of design decisions that show up in framework code
• Experience designing internal APIs and frameworks that other engineers build on, with focus on backwards-compatibility and ergonomics
• Solid understanding of systems programming fundamentals: memory management, shared libraries, ABI stability, linking, interfacing with the operating system
• Comfort with linear algebra and applied math
• Familiarity with Linux-based C++ development toolchains
• Ability to reason about performance-sensitive code — cache behavior, memory layout, algorithmic complexity
• Clear technical communication and ability to work in a large, shared codebase and negotiate architectural decisions that affect a growing team
• Eligibility to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Government Secret security clearance

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of professional experience with C++20
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers on a project — setting technical direction and bringing others along
• Comfort operating in ambiguity — scoping the problem, the approach, and the interfaces when none exist yet, and driving them to a decision
• Experience with military simulation, defense modeling & simulation, or related domains
• Experience with Entity-Component-System architectures or game engine design patterns
• Experience in designing and implementing GUI-supported workflows
• Familiarity with gRPC, DIS (IEEE 1278.1) distributed simulation standard
• Experience with Python/C++ interop (pybind11, embedded interpreters)
• Familiarity with behavior trees or autonomous agent architectures
• Developing in Nix
• Experience with numerical simulation, physics modeling, or scientific computing