Technical Project Manager (Machine Vision), Manufacturing Automation

Anduril Industries; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Anduril Industries seeks a Technical Project Manager for its Costa Mesa, CA team. You will coordinate machine vision deployments, work with engineering and operations, and manage scoping, delivery, and sustainment of tools and processes across the company.

Ideal candidates are ambitious, organized, and concise communicators with 3+ years in hardware/manufacturing projects, comfortable on the factory floor, and willing to travel between sites.

Qualifications

• U.S. Person due to access to export-controlled information or facilities.
• Must be eligible for a U.S. security clearance.
• 3+ years managing technical projects or programs in hardware/manufacturing/automation or equipment deployment.
• Experience translating ambiguous stakeholder needs into written requirements, acceptance criteria, and test plans.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, technicians, operators, and senior leadership.
• Comfortable working on an active factory floor, including occasional off-shift support and travel between Anduril manufacturing sites.

Responsibilities

• Engage with product lines to evaluate pain points and quantify baselines (escape rate, inspection hours, scrap and rework costs).
• Develop technical design documentation including requirements, acceptance criteria, integration constraints, and test plans.
• Forecast scope creep and ensure understanding of capabilities and limits by product lines.
• Manage delivery dates of machine vision deployments across concurrent projects; build schedules considering lead times and factory downtime.
• Coordinate cross-functional engagement across manufacturing, quality engineering, controls, IT/infrastructure, facilities, and product lines.
• Drive installation, acceptance testing, operator training, and documentation; establish spares and escalation paths for sustained operation.
• Scale the function by creating repeatable playbooks, templates, and deployment metrics.

Education

Bachelor's degree in engineering or technical field

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 JOB

We are looking for a Technical Project Manager to join our rapidly growing team in Costa Mesa, CA. You will work with the Machine Vision team to coordinate the deployment and sustainment of new tools, processes, equipment, and capabilities across the company. You will be involved in the scoping, delivery, and impact of every machine vision project. That means routine engagement with product lines, partnering with the Machine Vision manager on the breakdown and allocation of assignments, pulling in cross-functional teams across Anduril, and staying with a system after it is installed to both measure its impact and support modifications and continuous improvement efforts. To be effective in this job you must be ambitious and high agency, organized and detail oriented, a quick learner and a concise communicator, fiscally intelligent, and humble.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Discovery and Scoping: Engage with product lines to evaluate their pain points, failure matrices, and current inspection and rework burden. Quantify the baseline (escape rate, inspection hours, scrap and rework cost) so that every deployment has a measurable "why" and a defensible return before engineering time is committed.
• Requirements and Technical Documentation: Work closely with machine vision engineers to develop the technical design documentation for a solution, including requirements, acceptance criteria, integration constraints, and the test plan that proves the system performs before it is handed to the floor.
• Scope and Expectation Management: Forecast scope creep and ensure the product line understands the capabilities and limits of a solution both now and as their design and process change.
• Schedule and Delivery Ownership: Manage delivery dates of machine vision deployments across several concurrent projects. Build schedules that respect lead times on optics and hardware, engineering capacity, and the factory downtime windows available to you. Routinely communicate hurdles, risks, and milestones to both Automation management and the product lines you support.
• Cross Functional Engagement: Own the engagement required to deliver machine vision solutions to the factory floor, working across manufacturing and quality engineering, controls, IT and infrastructure, facilities, and the product lines themselves.
• Deployment and Sustainment: Drive installation, acceptance testing, and operator training. Stand up the documentation, spares, and escalation paths that keep a system working, and feed recurring failures back into the team’s roadmap.
• Scale the Function: Turn individual deployments into a repeatable playbook of intake, prioritization criteria, documentation templates, and deployment metrics, so the team can serve more product lines without adding a coordinator for every project.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export-controlled information or facilities
• Must be eligible for a U.S. security clearance
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, a technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years managing technical projects or programs in a hardware, manufacturing, automation, or equipment-deployment environment
• Demonstrated success delivering technical projects on schedule across engineering and operations stakeholders, with clear ownership of scope, schedule, and cost
• Experience translating ambiguous stakeholder needs into written requirements, acceptance criteria, and test plans that engineers can build against
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, technicians, operators, and senior leadership
• Comfortable working on an active factory floor, including occasional off-shift support during installation and buy-off, and travel between Anduril manufacturing sites as required

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Hands-on exposure to machine vision or industrial automation: Cognex, Keyence, MVTec Halcon, OpenCV, or comparable platforms
• Experience integrating robotics, PLC and controls systems, fixturing, or automated test equipment
• Experience in a manufacturing environment spanning new product introduction (NPI) through rate production, particularly high-mix lines where the design is still changing
• Familiarity with quality methods: FMEA, measurement system analysis and gage R&R, Cp/Cpk, SPC, and structured root-cause analysis
• Experience working with MES, ERP, or SCADA and HMI platforms such as Ignition
• Familiarity with basic networking architecture, including static IP addressing, VLANs, and communication protocols
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, Lucid, Airtable, and other project tracking tools
• Prior work in an export-controlled, regulated, or defense manufacturing environment
• Demonstrated interest in national security issues and defense technologies

US Salary Range

$140,000 - $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.