Description
The Air Dominance and Strike Division is one of Anduril's fastest growing, most technically complex divisions. We develop and build collaborative combat aircraft, missiles, and the software that powers these autonomous weapons. We are scaling production of a first-of-kind autonomous aircraft at Arsenal 1 in Ohio, and quality is not just a compliance function here. It is a cost lever, a schedule lever, and a credibility lever with the customer.
The system that connects incoming quality to defects to root cause to cost impact does not exist at scale yet. You are going to build it. You are not a quality engineer. You are the person who makes quality engineering outcomes measurable, sustainable, and tied to dollars.
Success in this position hinges on three key facets:
- Cost-of-Poor-Quality (COPQ) ownership - you own the financial narrative of quality. Every defect, every escape, every rework hour has a dollar value and you make that visible, traceable, and actionable.
- Cross-team accountability - when a defect pattern emerges, you trace it to the source, get the right people solving it, and prove it is fixed in cost and cycle time, not just defect count. Problems die at the root.
- Technical credibility - you understand manufacturing processes, materials, and failure modes well enough to challenge root cause analysis and know when a corrective action will actually hold.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Building and owning the mechanisms that connect incoming quality, in-process defects, root cause, and cost impact into a closed loop that drives decisions
- Owning cost-of-quality trending, closed-loop resolution rate, and continuous improvement velocity measured in cost and cycle time
- Driving cross-team resolution across quality engineering, production, supply chain, and design when quality issues emerge
- Owning schedule and financial performance of every quality-driven decision on the program
- Building KPIs that connect operational quality metrics to program-level cost, schedule, and delivery outcomes
- Driving qualification decisions with cost and schedule data, ensuring quality gates accelerate production rather than bottleneck it
- Leveraging quantitative models (statistical process control, classification, causal analysis, predictive defect modeling) to identify patterns before they become systemic
- Preparing technical documentation, analysis reports, and briefings for internal teams, customers, and government stakeholders
- Maintaining reproducible analysis pipelines using version control, scripting, and scalable workflows