Program Chief Engineer

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology.

We are seeking a Program Chief Engineer to join our rapidly growing team in Irvine, CA. This role provides an opportunity for immediate impact on real-world operations. Our focus is on creating groundbreaking technology that operators need and trust, and all your work will feed into this.

Responsibilities

• Stakeholder Engagement: Build and maintain relationships with internal stakeholders, external clients, and industry partners to gather insights, align objectives, and secure buy-in for strategic initiatives.
• Technical Ownership: Drive technical outcomes through meticulous understanding of system performance, drive product development through operational learnings and data, own the technical narrative from product deliver through continuous improvements.
• Tactical Execution: Bring clarity to the path between engineering development and operational delivery.
• Strategic Planning: Translate strategic business goals and program requirements into actionable project plans, setting clear milestones, and driving initiatives from conception through to successful completion.
• Execute Autonomously: Execute on broad and/or ambiguous requirements from external clients.
• Enable Cross Team Collaboration: Manage, unblock, and accelerate cross-team projects spanning multiple teams and initiatives.
• Shape Growth Opportunities: Support the drafting of technical proposals, ensuring that potential projects and scaling opportunities with each account are accurately scoped, resourced, and aligned with the organization's capabilities and strategic goals.

Requirements

• Minimum of 4+ years experience as a Chief Engineer, Technical Program Manager, Technical Product Manager, Engineering Manager, or Engineer in an autonomous systems, robotics, or software development environment.
• Proven client-facing technical program management and/or systems engineering experience, preferably in the defense, national security, or aerospace domains.
• A strong familiarity with robotics, sensor integrations, or computer vision systems and their architecture preferred.
• Proven experience leading a technical team of peers to field hardware or software products to real operating environments.
• Experience working in a rapidly iterating test environment with high levels of integration with software development teams.
• Solid technical aptitude and an ability to understand technical designs, software development lifecycle, challenges and risks.
• Ability to work with internal and external stakeholders, across a wide range of technical comfort.
• 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 in building programs for software and testing deliverables from ground up.
• Strong technical, analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive decisions.
• Ability to work within organizations with minimal structure and with minimal direction.
• Experience in rolling out potentially disruptive organizational process changes.
• Experience with tools like JIRA and Confluence.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or an Engineering discipline.

Benefits

• Competitive salary: $129,000-$171,000 USD
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• Income protection: life and disability insurance
• Generous time off: highly competitive PTO plans
• Family planning and parenting support
• Mental health resources
• Professional development: annual reimbursement
• Commuter benefits
• Retirement savings plan