SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 191,000 - 253,000 / annual
Anduril Industries, a defense technology company, is seeking a Staff Systems Engineer to lead payload integration for the Thunder autonomous attack rotorcraft program within the Maneuver Dominance team. Thunder is a compact autonomous aircraft designed to operate in large coordinated teams alongside crewed combat aviation, with advanced autonomy powered by Lattice OS.
In this role, you will own the perception system architecture and sensing payload integration for Thunder. Your responsibilities include:
- Drive the perception system architecture and requirements baseline, decomposing mission needs into detection, range, field of regard, latency, and availability requirements, allocating them across sensing, compute, and algorithms, and maintaining traceability through test evidence.
- Own the sensor suite baseline and configuration across platforms, including sensor modality selection, part numbers, installation locations, and interfaces to programs and airframes.
- Set and defend the sensing performance model, including detection probability and false alarm rate characterization against target size, reflectivity, range, aspect, illumination, and weather conditions, built from radiometry and detector performance and reconciled against flight test results.
- Drive the verification and validation strategy for perception systems, including verification plans, bench and hardware-in-the-loop coverage, sensor characterization tests, flight test objectives, and evidence packages demonstrating capability readiness.
- Provide technical authority at design and gate reviews, judging sufficiency of perception evidence and completeness of coverage.
- Lead sensor trades that resolve critical decisions, framing the decision, defining criteria, running analysis, and documenting results for organizational continuity.
- Drive modularity and reuse across platforms, including sensor abstraction, interface stability under sensor substitution, and open mission system alignment.
- Establish sensing engineering practices and methodologies that others inherit, including performance modeling, sensor characterization, and proof standards.
- Own perception in flight: instrument flight tests, be present at aircraft, 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 bodies, sensor vendors, development partners, and customer technical engagement.
REQUIREMENTS:
- B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Optics, Physics, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or similar field, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of engineering experience on electro-optical, LiDAR, RADAR, or comparable sensing systems, including time as technical owner of a sensing system through fielded or flight-demonstrated performance.
- Demonstrated depth in multi-modal sensor architecture and sensor selection, with working command of detection physics bounding each modality.
- Demonstrated experience owning system architecture and interface definition for sensing systems, including interfaces to compute, autonomy consumers, and vehicle.
- Ability to exercise extremely high ownership over complex systems 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 models 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 (NETD, NEP), resolution and MTF, and atmospheric transmission effects on range.
- Demonstrated experience with systems engineering rigor: requirements management, traceability to verification, ICDs, and technical performance measures as managed baseline.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication, including presenting and defending technical positions to program leadership, engineering peers, and external audiences (standards bodies, development partners, customers).
- Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a US Top Secret security clearance.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with learned perception in safety-relevant systems, including evaluation gates, dataset and labeling strategy, and arguments for model trustworthiness.
- Experience with embedded compute and SWaP-C budgeting for airborne perception, including end-to-end latency budgets from photon to autonomy input.
- Experience with environmental qualification of airborne sensors (MIL-STD-810, MIL-STD-461) and airworthiness or certification evidence for aircraft.
- Experience transitioning capabilities from development into delivery programs or product lines, including evidence handoff.
- Experience as technical lead or principal investigator in matrixed or IRAD-funded environments.
- Experience with requirements management tooling such as Jama, including traceability from requirement through verification evidence.
- Participation in standards or industry bodies relevant to airborne sensing or airspace integration (RTCA, SAE committees).
