Mission Operations Lead, Maritime
Anduril · Costa Mesa, United States · 7d ago
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.
ABOUT THE TEAM
At Anduril, we are developing unmanned systems for subsurface, surface, land, and air domains that will leverage unsupervised autonomy for the delivery of multi-mission capability to our customers. Deciding what to build — and in what order — requires people who can connect operational problems, threat-informed scenarios, customer needs, and product employment concepts to the capability we field. We are looking for a Mission Operations Lead to do that work at the enterprise level, based at our Costa Mesa, California headquarters.
ABOUT THE JOB
Our next Mission Operations Lead has built and executed plans in the maritime domain, has stood watch, and has been to sea, preferably using uncrewed systems. That background is what separates an analytic product that operators recognize as real from one that reads well and gets ignored. Equally important is the ability to carry that work into a room of senior military and civilian decision-makers and hold it there: this role briefs Commanding Officers, high-level civilians, and our own executive team, and it is expected to give direct answers under hard questioning.
Customer engagement is key, with opportunity to embed directly with our warfighters to provide real-time analysis and feedback on Anduril products. You will normalize how mission problems are framed so that competing programs can be compared on the same terms, and so that investment, roadmap, and capture decisions rest on a defensible operational argument rather than on whichever program briefed most recently.
Being co-located with product leadership, engineering leads, growth, and program directors is the point of the job. You will spend your days in the rooms where trades get made: pressure-testing a concept of employment with the engineers who have to build it, reconciling a program director’s field reality with a product lead’s roadmap, and giving executives the one-page operational case they need to commit capital. Expect up to 50% travel across company facilities, test and demonstration sites, waterfront and fleet concentration areas, and customer locations — the analysis has to survive contact with the water, not just the whiteboard.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Understand the enterprise-level mission analysis for the maritime portfolio — identify operational problems, capability gaps, and opportunities for differentiated system employment, and maintain a coherent picture of them across programs rather than one program at a time and be able to communicate them to the customer across the Maritime suite of products
- Develop and refine concepts of operation, concepts of employment, operational vignettes, mission threads, and use cases for current and future systems, and keep them current as designs and customer priorities move
- Inform capability roadmaps, IRAD and investment prioritization, and product-market fit assessments by making the operational case for where the next dollar and the next engineer should go
- Analyze threat environments, customer missions, force structure, operational constraints, and campaign-level context, and translate that context into capability priorities and defensible requirements for product and engineering teams
- Compare alternative capability approaches and assess trade-offs in mission utility, feasibility, scalability, cost, survivability, and operational relevance — including the approaches we should decline to pursue
- Convert results from at-sea demonstrations, field test events, and program execution into portfolio-level lessons that change what we build, closing the loop between the deck plate and the roadmap
- Partner with systems analysts, engineers, operators, program directors, and business-line leaders to ensure technical solutions remain anchored to real warfighting needs as programs mature
- Represent the operational perspective in cross-functional reviews, gate decisions, and portfolio planning cycles, and serve as a trusted interpreter between customer language, operational need, product strategy, and engineering implications
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years of maritime operational planning experience — building, staffing, and executing operational or campaign plans in the maritime domain at a unit, strike group, numbered fleet, MOC, or component command level
- Experience tactically employing AUV capabilities or equivalent autonomous system experience
- Demonstrated ability to brief and defend operational objectives, and platform capabilities and limitations in front of senior military and civilian decision-makers —Commanding Officers, high-level civilians, and corporate executives — including under direct and skeptical questioning
- Ability to decompose ambiguous operational problems into structured executable strategies at the tactical level
- Strong understanding of maritime missions, operational concepts, threat-informed planning, and the relationship between technology and warfighting outcomes
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce executive-level briefings
- Demonstrated ability to influence decisions across technical, operational, and business stakeholders without owning them — this role earns its authority through the quality of its analysis
- Ability to hold a portfolio-level view: comfort working several programs, mission areas, and time horizons in parallel and prioritizing among them
- Strong judgment, intellectual curiosity, and comfort operating with incomplete information in a fast-paced environment
- Ability to translate between customer language, operational need, product strategy, and engineering implications
- Willingness to travel up to 50% to multiple company facilities, test and demonstration sites, customer locations, and at-sea or field events
- Currently possesses and is able to maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 8+ years of experience supporting maritime, undersea, or autonomous systems mission areas; experience across air, surface, C2, ISR, fires, or logistics is also valued
- Watch floor experience — TAO, watch officer, battle watch captain, or equivalent time in a maritime operations center, fleet or component watch floor, or afloat combat information center, where decisions were made on incomplete information against a clock
- Significant at-sea operational experience, including underway deployments, and credibility with the operators who will employ these systems
- Prior military, DoD, defense industry, intelligence community, operational test, or tactical level development experience
- Familiarity with CONOPS development, campaign analysis, wargaming, modeling and simulation, operational test, or requirements development
- Experience working directly with government customers, senior military leaders, product teams, or engineering organizations
- Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Top Secret security clearance
The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Anduril's total compensation package. Additionally, Anduril offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:
Benefits
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.
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