Defense Software Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century’s most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.

The Air Defense team builds robots that find other robots and knock them out of the sky. At a time when air superiority can no longer be taken for granted, the Air Defense Team provides mission critical capabilities to warfighters. From detection to tracking, identification, deterrence, and defeat, our family of networked sensors and effectors enables our customers to rapidly close the kill chain against a broad range of Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) threats. Working across product, engineering, sales, logistics, operations, and mission success, the Air Defense team develops, tests, deploys, and sustains the Anduril Air Defense Family of Systems (FoS) in challenging operational environments worldwide.

We’re seeking a integrations focused Senior Software Engineer to join our rapidly growing Air Defense team in Irvine, CA. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will solve a wide variety of problems involving networking, autonomy, systems integration, robotics, and more, while making pragmatic engineering tradeoffs along the way. Your efforts will ensure that Anduril products seamlessly work together to achieve a variety of critical outcomes. Above all, Mission Software Engineers are driven by a “Whatever It Takes” mindset—executing in an expedient, scalable, pragmatic way while keeping the mission top‑of‑mind and making sound engineering decisions to deliver successful outcomes correctly, on‑time, and with high quality.

• Travel 50% or more of time outside of the United States to build, test, and deploy capabilities in the real world
• Own the software solutions that are deployed to customers
• Write code to improve products and scale the mission capability to more customers
• Collaborate across multiple teams to plan, build, and test complex functionality
• Create and analyze metrics that are leveraged for debugging and monitoring
• Triage issues, root cause failures, and coordinate next steps
• Partner with end‑users to turn needs into features while balancing user experience with engineering constraints

• Strong engineering background from industry or school, ideally in areas/fields such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or Physics
• 6+ years working with a variety of programming languages such as Python, C++, Rust, Go, JavaScript, etc.
• Experience building software solutions involving significant amounts of data processing and analysis
• Ability to quickly understand and navigate complex systems and established code bases
• A desire to work on critical software that has a real‑world impact
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance

• Strong background with focus in Physics, Mathematics, and/or Motion Planning to inform modeling & simulation (M&S) and physical systems
• Developing and testing multi‑agent autonomous systems and deploying in real‑world environments
• Feature and algorithm development with an understanding of behavior trees
• Developing software/hardware for flight systems and safety critical functionality
• Distributed communication networks and message standards
• Knowledge of military systems and operational tactics

US Salary Range: $191,000 — $253,000 USD

At Anduril, we invest in our people. Our comprehensive, competitive benefits package (available at little to no cost to employees) ensures you’re supported in health, recovery, and whatever comes next. For more information, Explore Our Benefits.