Staff Systems Engineer - Payload Lead

Anduril Industries; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 191,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Equity grants

Total compensation package

Job summary

Anduril Industries seeks a Staff Systems Engineer to support payloads integration for the Thunder team. You will own perception systems across platforms and drive verification, validation, and performance models, including sensor selection and interfaces to compute and autonomy modules.

Applicants should have 5+ years in electro-optical, LiDAR, or RADAR systems, strong system engineering discipline, and the ability to work across design, integration, and flight test.

Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Optics, Physics, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or equivalent.
• 5+ years of engineering experience on electro-optical, LiDAR, RADAR, or comparable sensing systems.
• Experience owning system architecture and interfaces for a sensing system.
• Ability to own a complex system across design, integration, and flight tests.
• Experience with sensing performance verification and validation.

Responsibilities

• Define perception system architecture and allocate requirements across sensors and compute.
• Own sensor baseline configuration and interfaces across platforms.
• Define and defend sensing performance models and validate against flight test data.
• Lead verification and validation strategy including test plans and data collection.
• Provide technical authority at design and gate reviews.

Skills

Sensing system architecture

Multi-modal sensor integration

Technical ownership

Requirements management

Strong communication

Education

BS/MS in EE/Optics/Physics/CS/Robotics/Aerospace

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 Maneuver Dominance team is building Thunder - an autonomous attack rotorcraft built to fight alongside crewed combat aviation to deliver overwhelming mass effects deep beyond the front lines. The team builds the Mission System and the autonomy that makes aircraft like Thunder work.

Autonomy is only as good as the link that carries it. Thunder is a compact airframe with weapons, sensors and radios competing for the same antenna real estate, flying low and in formation, in a spectrum that is actively contested. That is the problem you would own.

ABOUT THE JOB

Anduril is seeking a Staff Systems Engineer to support payloads integration for the Thunder team. The Maneuver Dominance (MD) Team at Anduril develops aerial robotic systems designed to operate in large coordinated teams in concert with ground maneuver forces.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Drive the perception system architecture and requirements baseline: decompose mission need into detection, range, field of regard, latency, and availability requirements, allocate them across sensing, compute, and algorithms, and keep them traceable through to test evidence
• Own the sensor suite baseline and its configuration across platforms, including which modalities and part numbers are in the baseline for each aircraft variant, where they are installed, and the interfaces to the programs and airframes that carry them
• Set and defend the sensing performance model: detection probability and false alarm rate against target size, reflectivity, range, aspect, illumination, and weather, built up from radiometry and detector performance, and reconciled against measured flight test results
• Drive the verification and validation strategy for perception: verification plans, bench and hardware in the loop coverage, sensor characterization test, flight test objectives, data collection needs, and the evidence package that demonstrates a capability is ready to graduate onto a program aircraft
• Provide the technical authority at design and gate reviews, judging whether perception evidence is sufficient and coverage is complete, and holding the line when it is not
• Lead sensor trades that resolve real forks, framing the decision, defining the criteria, running the analysis, and documenting the result so it survives the people who made it
• Drive modularity and reuse so that perception ports across platforms, including sensor abstraction, interface stability under sensor substitution, and open mission system alignment
• Set the sensing engineering practice that others inherit: how we model performance, how we characterize a sensor, and what constitutes proof, so that each new effort starts from an established method rather than reinventing one
• Own perception in the air: instrument flight tests, be at the aircraft for them, and drive the analysis loop from collected data back into requirements and architecture
• Represent Anduril externally as a technical authority on airborne sensing, including standards and industry bodies, sensor vendors and development partners, and technical engagement with customers

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Optics, Physics, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or a similar field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of engineering experience on electro-optical, LiDAR, RADAR, or comparable sensing systems, including time as the technical owner of a sensing system through to fielded or flight demonstrated performance
• Demonstrated depth in multi-modal sensor architecture and sensor selection, with a working command of the detection physics that bounds each one
• Demonstrated experience owning system architecture and interface definition for a sensing system, including the interfaces to compute, to autonomy consumers, and to the vehicle
• Ability to exercise extremely high ownership over a complex system across design, integration, test, and flight test
• Demonstrated experience specifying and verifying sensing performance quantitatively, including detection and false alarm characterization, range performance analysis, and validation of a model against measured data
• Working command of electro-optical, LiDAR, and/or RADAR system engineering fundamentals: radiometry and link budgets, detector and optics selection, noise and sensitivity metrics such as NETD and NEP, resolution and MTF, and atmospheric transmission and its effect on range
• Demonstrated experience with the systems engineering rigor this role sits on: requirements management, traceability to verification, ICDs, and technical performance measures as a managed baseline
• Outstanding written and verbal communication, including presenting and defending technical positions to program leadership, to engineering peers who disagree, and to audiences outside the company such as standards bodies, development partners, and customers
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a US Top Secret security clearance

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience with learned perception in a safety relevant system, including evaluation gates, dataset and labeling strategy, and the argument for why a model’s measured performance is trustworthy
• Experience with embedded compute and SWaP-C budgeting for airborne perception, including latency budgets end to end from photon to autonomy input
• Experience with environmental qualification of airborne sensors, for example MIL-STD-810 and MIL-STD-461, and with airworthiness or certification evidence for aircraft
• Experience transitioning a capability out of development and into a delivery program or product line, including the evidence handoff
• Experience as a technical lead or principal investigator, in a matrixed or IRAD funded environment
• Experience with requirements management tooling such as Jama, including traceability from requirement through to verification evidence
• Participation in a standards or industry body relevant to airborne sensing or airspace integration, for example RTCA or SAE committee work

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:

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.