Anduril Careers: How to Get Hired at the Leading Defense Tech Company
A nine-year-old Costa Mesa startup, valued at $30.5 billion after its June 2025 Series G, has become the most aggressive cleared-talent recruiter in the defense industry. Here is what its hiring loop actually looks like in 2026.
$30.5B
Series G valuation, Jun 2025
$517K+
Staff SWE total comp ceiling (Levels.fyi, 2026)
~8,200
Employees, end of 2025
Anduril Industries is the closest thing the defense sector has to a Silicon Valley pacing layer. Founded in 2017 by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, the Costa Mesa, California company has won contracts across U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and allied governments in the United Kingdom and Australia. As of June 2025, it raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion post-money valuation in a Series G led by Founders Fund, with reported secondary-tender activity in late 2025 pushing the shadow valuation toward the $60 billion mark. By the end of 2025 the company had grown to approximately 8,200 employees, up from 4,490 at the end of 2024, per Revelio Labs’s public headcount tracker. CEO Brian Schimpf put a finer point on it in a May 2026 Fortune profile: the company is “8 years-ish in, at about 7K employees, and consistently doubling revenue every year” past $1 billion.
For candidates with an active Department of Defense (DoD) clearance, software depth, or hardware shipping experience, Anduril is a rare combination: startup compensation structures, defense-grade missions, and a willingness to interview engineers who never spent a day inside a traditional prime. This guide breaks down what Anduril builds, which roles it is filling in 2026, what those roles pay, and how the interview loop actually runs — with every load-bearing number anchored to a primary source.
What Anduril Builds: Lattice, Roadrunner, Ghost, ALTIUS, Sentry Tower, Dive-LD, Barracuda, Fury, EagleEye
Anduril’s product portfolio is unusual for a defense company because it spans software and multiple hardware domains under one engineering organization. The connective tissue is Lattice, an AI-driven command-and-control platform that fuses sensor feeds from Anduril and third-party systems into a single tactical picture. Lattice is the company’s flagship software product and the substrate underneath every hardware line.
On the hardware side, Anduril ships Roadrunner, a reusable vertical-takeoff interceptor for counter-drone missions that the Pentagon bought in October 2024 under a $250 million contract for 500 all-up rounds plus the Pulsar electronic-warfare capability; Ghost, a small unmanned aircraft system used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Special Operations Command; ALTIUS, an air-launched effects family acquired from Area-I; Sentry Tower, the 300+ autonomous surveillance towers deployed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection along the southern border under a $363 million CBP SBIR Phase III contract; and Dive-LD, a long-duration autonomous underwater vehicle whose technology was extended into the Ghost Shark XL-AUV program for the Royal Australian Navy. The company also operates a solid rocket motor production line in coastal Mississippi through the June 2023 acquisition of Adranos, the inventor of the ALITEC aluminum-lithium alloy rocket fuel.
Three product lines define Anduril’s 2025-2026 hiring posture. The first is Barracuda, a family of modular, software-defined cruise missiles unveiled in September 2024 and ramping toward 5,000 units per year by end-2026. The second is the YFQ-44A “Fury”, the company’s autonomous fighter selected by the U.S. Air Force in April 2024 as one of two Increment 1 winners of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program; the YFQ-44A made its first semi-autonomous flight on October 31, 2025 and entered production at Arsenal-1 in March 2026. The third is EagleEye, the mixed-reality battlefield helmet that Anduril took over from Microsoft in February 2025 as part of the $22 billion Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) contract novation, finalized by the U.S. Army on April 10, 2025 per Breaking Defense. EagleEye also serves as the prototype platform for the U.S. Army’s $159 million Soldier-Borne Mission Command (SBMC) contract awarded in September 2025, with Meta supplying display optics, Oakley Standard Issue handling ruggedization, Gentex on the helmet, and Qualcomm on chips.
“We just are empowering very smart engineers to just go out and crush problems — if we’re not actually designing things for manufacturing at day one, you just can’t do it.”
— Brian Schimpf, CEO and co-founder of Anduril Industries, Lux Capital Riskgaming podcast, November 15, 2024
The takeaway: Anduril is not a single-product company. Your skills can land anywhere from kernel-level autonomy stacks to composite manufacturing to mission planning UI — and the interview loop is calibrated to your strongest domain, not a generic checklist.
Where Anduril Hires: Costa Mesa, Columbus, Atlanta, Boston, DC, Sydney, London
The corporate headquarters sits in Costa Mesa, California, and remains the densest engineering site, particularly for Lattice software and the Ghost and Roadrunner programs. The single most consequential addition to the company’s geographic footprint is Arsenal-1, a 5-million-square-foot hyperscale manufacturing campus on 500 acres in Pickaway County, Ohio, about 20 miles south of Columbus near Rickenbacker International Airport. Anduril announced the site in January 2025, broke ground that spring, and committed roughly $900 million to the first build-out; the facility was in production by March 2026, months ahead of its July target, with YFQ-44A Fury, Roadrunner, Barracuda, and a classified platform as the launch product set. The state of Ohio projects Arsenal-1 will support 4,000 direct jobs by 2030.
The Atlanta region has grown into the company’s primary tactical-missile and solid-rocket-motor footprint following the Adranos acquisition and the McHenry, Mississippi expansion. Boston hosts robotics and underwater-systems work tied to Dive-LD. Washington, DC is the federal go-to-market and program management hub, where most program managers, contract-strategy hires, and government-affairs roles are based. Internationally, Anduril operates engineering and program offices in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia, in support of the Ghost Shark XL-AUV program — under which the Royal Australian Navy signed a A$1.7 billion (US$1.13 billion) five-year contract in September 2025 and accepted the first operational XL-AUV in November 2025. London supports United Kingdom defense customers. Remote work exists for a narrow set of senior software roles, but the strong default is on-site or hybrid in one of the above locations because of classified-program constraints.
Roles Open in 2026: Software, Hardware, ML, Manufacturing, Program Management
Anduril’s open-roles page routinely lists 600 to 900 active requisitions across the five domains below, and the ClearanceJobs Anduril employer page typically surfaces 400-500 of those as cleared positions. The mix has shifted noticeably toward manufacturing and program management as production contracts ramp, but software engineering remains the largest single bucket by headcount and the most consistent hiring channel for candidates without prior defense experience.
| Role family (2026 hiring mix) | Typical sub-tracks | Clearance posture |
|---|---|---|
| Software engineering | Lattice platform, autonomy, C2 UI, simulation, embedded, infra | Most require active Secret or higher; some entry tracks sponsor |
| Hardware / mechanical | Aerospace, composites, propulsion (Adranos line), mechatronics | Sponsorship common; production roles often Secret-eligible |
| Machine learning | Computer vision, sensor fusion, reinforcement learning for autonomy | Mixed; many roles sponsor, some require active TS |
| Manufacturing | Production engineering, test, supply chain, quality (Arsenal-1, Mississippi) | Mostly uncleared or Secret-sponsor |
| Program management | USAF CCA programs, USMC counter-drone, capture, technical PM | Active Secret minimum; many require Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) |
Compensation Bands: What Anduril Roles Actually Pay in 2026
Anduril compensates on a startup-style three-component model: cash base, target performance bonus, and equity in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs) tied to the company’s growing private valuation. The most precise public data point is Levels.fyi’s crowd-sourced Anduril software-engineer compensation aggregator, which as of May 2026 reports a range from $205,000 (L3) to $517,000+ (L7) in total compensation, with a median of $268,000 across 80+ self-reported offers. Hardware and ML bands are less densely sampled but track 10-15% below software in the same level. Total-compensation ranges in the table below reflect those reported figures for U.S. Roles across levels, with base, target bonus, and annualized RSU value at the $30.5B Series G reference valuation. They should be treated as directional, not guaranteed.
| Role (2026) | Total comp range (L3 to L7) | Source / notes |
|---|---|---|
| Software engineer | $205,000 – $517,000+ | Levels.fyi median $268K, May 2026 data; L7 staff/principal pulls the ceiling |
| Hardware engineer | $160,000 – $370,000 | Aerospace + propulsion at the top; mechatronics at the floor |
| ML engineer | $190,000 – $470,000 | Cleared autonomy and computer vision pull the ceiling |
| Program manager | $170,000 – $300,000 | DC-based TS/SCI programs cluster in upper half |
| Manufacturing engineer | $110,000 – $200,000 | Arsenal-1 (Ohio) and Costa Mesa production lines |
| Engineering manager (L5) | $625,000 – $875,000+ | Levels.fyi L5 manager median $625K (May 2026) |
An active TS/SCI clearance is currently worth between 15% and 25% in cleared-market premium, per the April 2024 ClearanceJobs Compensation Special Report, which put TS/SCI cleared engineers’ average total compensation at $147,000 and TS/SCI IT professionals at $132,000 in 2023. The follow-on 2026 ClearanceJobs Compensation Report places the cleared-workforce overall average at $126,125 for 2025 — an all-time high — with intelligence-community employees averaging above $170,000 and Virginia-based cleared professionals at $138,748. Full-Scope polygraph holders add another tier (the same 2024 report put FS-poly engineers and IT professionals above $150,000). Anduril is widely understood to be at or above that cleared premium for cleared software hires, with equity refresh grants vesting over four years and internal liquidity programs since 2022, most recently in early 2026.
Funding History and the Hiring Rate It Produced
Anduril has raised capital roughly every 12 to 18 months since its 2017 founding, and every round has paid for a step-function expansion in headcount. The table below pulls together public funding-round and headcount data from across primary sources — Anduril press releases, TechCrunch, Reuters, Fortune, and Revelio Labs — into one timeline.
| Year | Round | Capital raised | Post-money valuation | Approx. Year-end headcount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Series A (Founders Fund) | $17.5M | ~$200M | ~10 |
| 2019 | Series C | ~$120M | ~$1.6B | ~250 |
| 2020 | Series D | $200M | ~$1.9B | ~750 |
| 2021 | Series E | $450M | ~$4.6B | ~1,200 |
| 2022 | extension | ~$1.5B | ~$8.5B | ~2,000 |
| 2024 (Aug) | Series F | $1.5B | ~$14.0B | ~4,490 |
| 2025 (Jun) | Series G | $2.5B | $30.5B | ~6,500 |
| 2025 (Dec) | secondary tender (reported) | n/a | ~$60B (shadow) | ~8,200 |
The pattern is consistent. Each round funds the next tier of products (counter-drone, autonomous fighter, undersea, missiles, mixed reality) and the manufacturing footprint that produces them, which in turn drives the next round. The hiring rate compounds the same way: Anduril added roughly 1,000 employees in 9 months to September 2024 per Fortune, and another ~3,700 from January 2025 to December 2025 per Revelio Labs. Co-founder Trae Stephens has argued publicly — in his May 2025 long-form interview with The Generalist and his October 2025 appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show — that the company’s defining innovation is treating defense the way Silicon Valley treats consumer hardware: software-first, hardware-enabled, R&D funded by private capital rather than cost-plus contracts. That financing model is exactly what allows the hiring rate to outpace traditional primes.
Inside the Anduril Interview Loop: Phone Screen to Onsite in Three Steps
Anduril’s loop is unusually fast for a defense company. According to interviewing.io’s process guide, the standard sequence is a 20-30 minute recruiter screen, a technical phone screen, and a half-day onsite loop — typically four hours covering two coding sessions, one system design, and one behavioral / mission-fit interview. The average software-engineer candidate clears the entire pipeline in 28 days from recruiter screen to offer. Program manager roles take longer because stakeholder interviews and clearance verification add weeks.
The technical phone screen for software roles leans heavily on systems design and real-world debugging rather than LeetCode trivia. Expect to read and modify a small C++ or Rust snippet, walk through a sensor-fusion or distributed-systems scenario, and discuss how you would handle a specific Lattice integration. LeetCode-medium problems show up but are typically wrapped in Anduril context — drone-management routing, sensor-stream deduplication. ML candidates get a paper deep-dive plus an applied autonomy or perception problem. Hardware candidates work through a mechanical or thermal design exercise tied to one of Anduril’s products. Program manager candidates are expected to present a written case study, often a teardown of a real defense acquisition that went well or badly.
The takeaway: The loop rewards depth over breadth. A candidate with one strong domain — production firmware, autonomy reinforcement learning, or counter-drone capture management — outperforms a generalist with thinner roots.
Major Active Contracts (2022 to 2026): Why Anduril Hires at This Rate
Anduril’s hiring spree is the visible end of an unusually contract-dense five-year stretch. The table below collects the company’s largest publicly disclosed active contracts and program awards as of mid-2026 — the ones that drive the bulk of cleared hiring across software, hardware, and program management.
| Program / customer | Anduril system | Contract value | Year awarded |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. SOCOM counter-UAS | Anvil + Lattice | ~$1.0B IDIQ | 2022 |
| U.S. CBP Autonomous Surveillance Towers | Sentry Tower | $363M (SBIR Phase III) | 2022 (running through 2026) |
| U.S. Air Force CCA Increment 1 | YFQ-44A Fury | cost-share, undisclosed | Apr 2024 |
| Pentagon counter-drone | Roadrunner-M + Pulsar | $250M (500 rounds) | Oct 2024 |
| U.S. Army IVAS (novated from Microsoft) | Lattice + EagleEye | $22B (10-year ceiling) | Apr 2025 (novation) |
| U.S. Marine Corps counter-drone | Anvil / Roadrunner | $642M | Mar 2025 |
| U.S. Army SBMC prototype | EagleEye mixed-reality helmet | $159M (prototype) | Sep 2025 |
| Royal Australian Navy Ghost Shark | XL-AUV (built on Dive-LD) | A$1.7B / US$1.13B | Sep 2025 |
“Unlike a lot of these other defense companies that are designing weapons that can only be made by really fancy, high-end bespoke factories, we’re designing weapons that can be made in existing American industrial capacity. Anything we are working on, anything that we are investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan.”
— Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, on The Joe Rogan Experience #2394, October 16, 2025 (transcript)
Clearance Preferences and Sponsorship: When Anduril Pays to Get You Cleared
Anduril’s clearance posture varies sharply by role and program. Roughly half of open requisitions in any given week require an active U.S. Government security clearance at the Secret level or higher, and a meaningful share require active Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI), particularly for Special Access Program (SAP) work tied to the U.S. Air Force CCA program or U.S. Special Operations Command counter-UAS lines. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) is the agency that processes most of these investigations. In Q4 of FY2024, the fastest-90% of DoD contractor TS clearances finished in 249 days end-to-end, with the Tier 5 investigation component running 208 days — figures DCSA publishes on its performance dashboard.
For roles that allow sponsorship, candidates typically receive a conditional offer and then spend three to nine months in interim Secret status before final adjudication. TS/SCI sponsorship is rarer and concentrated in software autonomy and program management tracks tied to high-priority government customers. Candidates from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Department of Defense (DoD) program offices generally clear faster because their existing investigations are recent and well-documented. The total U.S. Cleared population sat near 4.0 million in 2024 per the ODNI Annual Statistical Transparency Report; Anduril is hiring against the active-clearance subset, which is roughly 60% of that total.
What Sets Anduril Apart From Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman
Three structural differences matter to candidates evaluating Anduril against the traditional defense primes. First is the funding model: Anduril builds products on its own balance sheet rather than waiting for cost-plus contracts, which means engineers ship roughly a generation per year instead of per decade. The Roadrunner counter-drone interceptor went from idea to operational combat evaluation in under two years; the YFQ-44A Fury went from clean-sheet design to first semi-autonomous flight in 556 days per the company’s own first-flight announcement. Second is equity: every full-time employee receives RSUs, and the upside in a pre-IPO defense company priced at $30.5 billion (with reported secondary-tender activity at ~$60B in late 2025) is structurally different from publicly traded primes paying flat cash. Third is engineering autonomy: Anduril teams own end-to-end product slices and are not gated by separate procurement, integration, and sustainment organizations.
The trade-off is intensity. Press reporting and Glassdoor reviews consistently describe a five-day on-site default for most engineering roles, the workweek skews long around production milestones, and the program tempo is set by contracted customer demonstrations rather than by sustainment timelines. Candidates coming from a 9/80 schedule at Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), or Northrop Grumman should plan for a real cultural shift — one that Schimpf himself frames in Lux Capital’s Riskgaming podcast as “there hasn’t been a growth defense company — there have only been dividend defense companies.” Anduril is betting the next decade on that distinction.
Frequently Asked Questions About Anduril Careers
Do I need an active security clearance to apply to Anduril?
No. Many engineering, manufacturing, and corporate roles are open to uncleared candidates and the company sponsors investigations for cleared positions. Roughly half of open requisitions in any given week require an active clearance at Secret or higher, but the other half do not. The careers site filters by clearance requirement.
How long does the Anduril hiring process take?
Engineering roles close in roughly four weeks from recruiter screen to offer for uncleared candidates per interviewing.io’s process guide, and six to eight weeks for cleared roles where reference checks and clearance verification add time. Program manager and capture roles take longer because of stakeholder interviews.
Does Anduril hire remote employees?
Sparingly. A narrow set of senior software roles allow remote or hybrid work, but the strong default is on-site or hybrid in Costa Mesa, Columbus (Arsenal-1, Pickaway County), Atlanta, Boston, Washington DC, Sydney, Brisbane, or London. Classified-program rules drive that posture for most engineering positions.
What is Anduril equity worth?
Full-time employees receive RSUs that vest over four years against a private valuation that has climbed from $4.6 billion at the 2021 Series E to $14 billion at the August 2024 Series F to $30.5 billion at the June 2025 Series G, with reported secondary-tender activity in late 2025 pushing the shadow valuation toward $60 billion. Internal liquidity programs in 2022, 2024, and early 2026 have given employees periodic chances to sell vested shares.
Does Anduril hire new graduates?
Yes. The company runs a structured new-grad program for software, hardware, and ML engineers, plus a smaller new-grad track for manufacturing and program management. Internship pipelines feed the new-grad program and are competitive; the most current opportunities surface on the Anduril open-roles page filtered by “new grad” or “intern”.
How big is Anduril and how fast is it growing?
Anduril ended 2024 with 4,490 employees and ended 2025 with approximately 8,200 per Revelio Labs’s public headcount tracker, with CEO Brian Schimpf describing the company as “about 7K employees, doubling revenue every year” past $1 billion in a May 2026 Fortune profile. By the end of 2026, the Arsenal-1 facility in Pickaway County, Ohio, alone is expected to support thousands of additional manufacturing roles on a path to 4,000 direct jobs by 2030.
Where to Look Next
- TS/SCI Clearance: What It Is, How to Get It, and Career Opportunities
- Levels of Security Clearance: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret
- Clearance Jobs: Complete Career Guide for Cleared Professionals
- Cleared Jobs Near Pentagon Arlington Virginia
- Cleared Jobs Near Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling DC
- Cleared Jobs Near Fort Belvoir Virginia
- Allied Universal Jobs: How to Apply, Pay Rates, and Career Advancement
