Staff Materials Engineer, Design Allowables & Materials Data

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

Job summary

Anduril Industries in California seeks a Senior Materials and Process Engineer to define design allowables and lead a data-driven materials program across an expansive defense portfolio.

You will establish standards for data capture, govern material qualification, and build scalable pipelines to support high-rate production while collaborating with design, analysis, and quality teams. A Top Secret clearance is required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Materials Engineering, Metallurgy or a related field.
• 8+ years of materials and process engineering experience in aerospace, defense, or a comparably rigorous domain.
• Deep expertise in materials characterization and design allowables development, including statistical basis (e.g., MMPDS / CMH-17-style methods).
• Demonstrated experience turning test data into governed, analysis-ready datasets—data structure, statistics, and traceability (materials data management).
• Experience with material qualification and characterization: mechanical testing, and translating results into usable design values.
• Proven ability to set a technical standard and drive adoption across teams.
• Strong technical writing—your methodology and specifications are clear, unambiguous, and actionable.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Own the Design Allowables Standard. Define and own how test data becomes a defensible design value across Anduril’s business lines, including criteria, traceability, versioning, and controlled release.
• Build the Materials Data Pipeline. Architect and stand up a data pipeline that ingests, structures, governs, and releases materials data into our enterprise materials database.
• Turn Testing into a Strategic Workflow. Transform data management from ad hoc testing into a defined system for what gets tested and how results become usable allowables.
• Establish Fatigue and Fracture-Critical Methodology. Define and implement a standardized approach to fatigue-life assessment and damage tolerance for fracture-critical applications.
• Extract Value from Lifecycle Material Data. Create a digital thread of material traceability, enabling faster, data-driven decision making across supply chain.
• Serve as the Cross-Business-Line Technical Authority. Be the SME for materials allowables and data across the portfolio, aligning with design, analysis, test, and quality teams.
• Seed the Function. Set the technical standard for materials data and allowables at Anduril and build the supporting team.

Skills

Top Secret clearance

Materials characterization

Design allowables

Data pipelines

Statistical basis

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science/Engineering

Tools

Materials informatics platforms

Statistics software

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

Anduril's Materials Engineering team is seeking a Senior Materials and Process Engineer with a background in structural composites and bonded structures to join our rapidly growing team. Our team is the materials authority across Anduril's product portfolio, from autonomous aircraft and submarines to missiles and solid rocket motors, providing material selection guidance, developing design allowables, and qualifying manufacturing processes that take composite hardware from prototype to high-rate production.

About the Role

Anduril designs and fields systems across an unusually broad materials portfolio. Advancing our products depends on trusted, analysis-ready design allowables across this full range of materials, and this role owns how we generate, govern, and scale that material property data company-wide.

This role is your opportunity to establish the methodology, infrastructure, and governance that turns materials characterization and material qualification into a strategically defined workflow for producing defensible, analysis-ready allowables. It’s your opportunity to set a technical standard and get an organization to adopt it. Shape how materials engineering gets done, not just what gets tested. You’ll build the foundation and scale it.

Who You Are

• You measure your impact by how much better you make the engineers around you. You build trust across teams, share credit, and are the person others seek out to solve hard problems with.
• You have a bias for action. You’d rather stand up a defensible first version and iterate toward rigor than wait to reach perfection.
• You think in systems as much as in specimens.
• You are as comfortable defining the statistical basis for a design value as you are architecting how that data is captured, governed, and reused.
• You do your best work where the path isn’t drawn yet. Ambiguity is a starting condition, not a blocker—bringing structure to fast-moving, loosely-defined problems is exactly the work, and exactly what you enjoy.

What You'll Do

• Own the Design Allowables Standard. Define and own how test data becomes a defensible design value across Anduril’s business lines—statistical basis (A-basis / B-basis, pooling, reduction methods), acceptance and inclusion criteria, traceability, versioning, and controlled release. Your methodology becomes the baseline every program’s materials data is held to.

• Build the Materials Data Pipeline. Architect and stand up a materials data pipeline that ingests, structures, governs, and releases materials data into our enterprise materials database. Establish the criteria and pipeline that let advanced and non-standard materials be characterized once, correctly, and reused across programs.

• Turn Testing into a Strategic Workflow. Transform materials characterization and test data management from testing performed as needed into a defined system: what gets tested, to what rigor, and how results become trusted allowables.

• Establish Fatigue and Fracture-Critical Methodology. Define and implement a standardized approach to fatigue-life assessment and damage tolerance, including the qualification path for using materials in a fracture-critical applications, so high-consequence design decisions rest on a consistent, defensible basis.

• Extract Value from Lifecycle Material Data. Build the means to turn the material property and certification data generated across our supply chain into a growing statistical foundation that strengthens our knowledge base over time. Supplier, process and lot-to-lot variability, becomes a queryable digital thread of material traceability, and enables faster decision making through quantified material and process metrics.

• Serve as the Cross-Business-Line Technical Authority. Be the subject-matter expert for materials allowables and data across the portfolio. Partner with design, analysis, test, and quality to align on data requirements, support design and qualification reviews, and drive adoption of the right sized solution for a program.

• Seed the Function. Set the technical standard for materials data and allowables at Anduril. Build the capability and with it, the team around you. A staff engineer here builds capability in the people and systems around them, not just in the work they touch.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Materials Engineering, Metallurgy or a related field
• 8+ years of materials and process engineering experience in aerospace, defense, or a comparably rigorous domain
• Deep expertise in materials characterization and design allowables development, including statistical basis (e.g., MMPDS / CMH-17-style methods)
• Demonstrated experience turning test data into governed, analysis-ready datasets—data structure, statistics, and traceability (materials data management)
• Experience with material qualification and characterization: mechanical testing, and translating results into usable design values
• Proven ability to set a technical standard and drive adoption across teams
• Strong technical writing—your methodology and specifications are clear, unambiguous, and actionable
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and drive progress independently in a fast-paced environment
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Active U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance
• Hands-on experience with scoping and executing a characterization campaign from scratch
• Background in fatigue and fracture mechanics, especially for fracture-critical or damage-tolerant components
• Experience with materials data management / materials informatics platforms and partnering with software/data teams to build data pipelines
• Direct experience with advanced or non-standard materials—high-temperature alloys, advanced composites, or additively-manufactured materials
• Experience integrating or standardizing materials data across disparate or legacy sources

US Salary Range

$166,000—$220,000 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:

Benefits

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.