Program Chief Engineer

About the Role Anduril is seeking a Program Chief Engineer to join our Irvine, CA team to drive an air defense program. This role offers immediate impact on real-world operations as we develop groundbreaking technology for operators; you will identify gaps in defense capabilities, engage with users, synthesize feedback, and build the program infrastructure to support our goals. What You'll Do

• 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. Act as the primary technical liaison for the client, advocate for their needs within the engineering organization and ensure their feedback directly influences the engineering roadmap. Communicate the outputs of these efforts including upcoming software releases, new capabilities, and performance improvement over time.
• 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. Credibly represent our system in front of technical and nontechnical clients.
• Tactical Execution: Bring clarity to the path between engineering development and operational delivery. Whether through sprint planning and execution or on-the-ground support of test events, attack blockers and guide the team through fast-paced execution to deliver the optimal technical outcome for the client.
• 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, ensuring they deliver intended outcomes and add value to the business. Oversee the allocation of personnel, budget, and other resources to ensure successful execution of these initiatives. When possible, lead with data.
• Execute Autonomously: Execute on broad and/or ambiguous requirements from external clients. Seize the opportunity to shape requirements in favor of the optimal product for the client and the company. Demonstrate high ownership on all pieces of work. Become a trusted partner to Anduril’s engineers.
• Enable Cross Team Collaboration: Manage, unblock, and accelerate cross-team projects spanning multiple teams and initiatives. Collaborate closely and even embed within partner teams, such as hardware, software, test, and field operations as needed.
• 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. Drive the alignment of the technical roadmap with the strategic vision. What We're Looking For
• 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 closely and effectively with engineering teams.
• 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 o Nice to Have
• A strong familiarity with robotics, sensor integrations, or computer vision systems and their architecture preferred. Compensation & Benefits
• Salary and benefits not disclosed in the posting.