Special Projects Manager, Air Defense

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 UAS threats. Working across product, engineering, business development, logistics, operations, and mission success, the Air Defense team develops, tests, deploys, and sustains the Anduril Air Defense Family of Systems in challenging operational environments worldwide.

Air Defense is a high-octane, rapidly scaling business line that develops, integrates, and fields an expanding mix of mature and novel capabilities to detect and defeat UAS threats. As our business line continues to scale, our newest emerging initiatives require focused direction and ownership to rapidly mature in support of Air Defense’s operational, technical, and financial objectives. These special projects are critical to our organization’s continued growth: they can convert into a new product, a new team, or a new program.
As a member of the Special Projects team within Air Defense’s Mission Operations organization, you will be an innovative and independent problem-solver at the forefront of some of our most critical initiatives. You will be rapidly inserted into fresh, dynamic, and at times chaotic situations on a weekly basis. You will wear many hats.
You will also be the face of Anduril to many of our end-users and our customers, capable of articulating the capabilities and limitations of Anduril’s products at both an executive and a layman’s level. You will communicate the “why” for emerging Air Defense technology at the intersection of programmatic, financial, technical, and operational considerations.
We move fast at Anduril and give tremendous freedom and autonomy to our new hires to assume responsibility and exercise prudent interdisciplinary judgement. You should expect to be running at least two cross-functional projects independently within 60 days of hiring. When you join our team, you’re signing up to immediately make an impact in our organization and with our customers globally.

• Product Development - you will lead teams building early-stage products, and will mature those teams to scale products. As a cross-functional leader within the business line, on any given day you may be working across the product, engineering, operations, logistics, and test teams to spearhead early-stage product development and maturation initiatives.
• Program Management - you partner with capture, growth, and engineering leads to shepherd emerging proposals into successful programs for the business line’s most strategic priorities. You will forecast resources, liaise with subject matter experts on engineering capacity, and exercise both strategic and tactical decision-making to ensure that our newest programs are set up for success across the dimensions of cost, schedule, and performance.
• Support Global Growth Initiatives - you will be a trusted consultant and supporting function on the Air Defense Business Line’s products for international development opportunities and for strategic international engagements. You communicate the nuances of engineering and production roadmaps for Air Defense products, consult on product-market fit for international growth-leads, and participate as the business-line representative in high-visibility engagements with senior domestic & foreign government officials.
• Flex Capacity - as Anduril grows, there’s stuff that we haven’t foreseen yet that will need a cross-functional leader to own end-to-end. You’ll be a full-field player for the business line and will demonstrate extreme professional versatility as an elite generalist.

This role is not for everyone. You will live on a constant rollercoaster of “it’s so over / we’re so back,” and you need to be the force that steadies the ship in large swells. We are far more interested in what you have done than where you are coming from, and have distilled some of the attributes that we are looking for below:

• First Principles Thinker: You break down complex problems into their most fundamental components and build solutions from what is known to be true and makes sense in context, rather than how it has been done in the past. You always question the status quo.
• Build with longevity in mind - you build teams and systems that are resilient and scalable beyond your personal involvement. You’re unafraid to leave something you’ve built, even when it’s quickly succeeding.
• Allergic to ambiguity - you use questions as tools and have a proven track-record of making sound decisions under uncertainty and with limited information.
• Master Communicator - you are fluent in the fundamental principles of persuasion and have elite writing, speaking, and narrative-crafting skills.
• Analytical Rigor and Versatility - you’re a dialectical thinker able to properly interpret contradictory information. You have an extensive analytical toolkit and have the intellectual awareness to update your views as you receive new information.
• Demonstrated Humility - you’re not above shouldering more than your share of the task, getting your hands dirty, and you champion the successes of the engineers you lead. No job is too small for you.
• Must Have:
• • Bachelor’s Degree
  • 4+ years as a cross-functional leader in hardware and/or software organizations
  • Demonstrated success delivering technology to large commercial institutions or government organizations
  • Proven experience leading tech-enabled teams of peers across specializations
  • Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Top Secret security clearance.
  • Willing to travel up to 50% of the time*

• Advanced Degree
• Experience in rapid prototype development and fielding
• Exposure to robot autonomy, machine learning, sensor fusion, data analytics
• Demonstrated interest in national security issues and defense technologies

*Position is full-time from Anduril office in Irvine, CA but requires travel to support customer delivery and training events.