SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 146,000 - 194,000 / annual
Anduril Industries is seeking a Systems Engineer to join the Air Defense team in Irvine, California. This role focuses on autonomous systems that detect and neutralize aerial threats, including products like Roadrunner, Sentry, Anvil, Pulsar, and Wisp integrated into a networked air defense family of systems.
You will serve as a technical bridge between internal engineering teams and external military clients, driving the development and deployment of cutting-edge autonomous defense capabilities. Your responsibilities include:
**Stakeholder Engagement:** Build and maintain relationships with internal stakeholders, external clients, and industry partners to gather insights and align objectives. Act as the primary technical liaison for clients, advocating for their needs within the engineering organization and ensuring their feedback directly influences the engineering roadmap. Communicate software releases, new capabilities, and performance improvements.
**Technical Ownership:** Drive technical outcomes through deep understanding of system performance. Own the technical narrative from product delivery through continuous improvements, and credibly represent the system to both technical and non-technical clients.
**Tactical Execution:** Bring clarity to the path between engineering development and operational delivery. Guide sprint planning, execution, and on-the-ground support of test events to deliver optimal technical outcomes.
**Strategic Planning:** Translate business goals and program requirements into actionable project plans with clear milestones. Oversee allocation of personnel, budget, and resources. Lead with data when possible.
**Autonomous Execution:** Execute on broad and ambiguous requirements from external clients. Shape requirements in favor of optimal products for both client and company. Demonstrate high ownership and become a trusted partner to engineers.
**Cross-Team Collaboration:** Manage, unblock, and accelerate cross-team projects spanning hardware, software, test, and field operations.
**Growth Opportunities:** Support technical proposals, ensure projects are accurately scoped and resourced, and drive alignment of technical roadmap with strategic vision.
This role offers immediate impact on real-world operations and the opportunity to work on groundbreaking technology that warfighters need and trust. You will thrive in a fast-paced environment with competing priorities, self-directing work and navigating ambiguity.
**Requirements:**
- Minimum 4+ years experience as a Systems Engineer in autonomous systems, robotics, or software development
- Proven client-facing technical program management and/or systems engineering experience, preferably in defense, national security, or aerospace domains
- Demonstrated experience authoring interface specs (ICDs) that other teams build against
- Experience owning or defending formal requirements/design reviews with strong root-cause/troubleshooting track record
- Strong familiarity with robotics, sensor integrations, or computer vision systems and their architecture (preferred)
- Proven experience leading technical teams to field hardware or software products to real operating environments
- Experience working in rapidly iterating test environments with high integration with software development teams
- Solid technical aptitude and ability to understand technical designs, software development lifecycle, challenges, and risks
- Ability to work effectively with internal and external stakeholders across varying technical comfort levels
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Must be able to obtain a minimum Secret Clearance
- Must be able to travel up to 25% of the time
**Preferred Qualifications:**
- Experience building programs for software and testing deliverables from ground up
- Strong technical, analytical, and quantitative skills with ability to use data and metrics to drive decisions
- Ability to work within organizations with minimal structure and direction
- Experience rolling out potentially disruptive organizational process changes
- Experience with JIRA and Confluence
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering discipline
