below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
94%
of similar roles. Most pay
$181,225–$244,812
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$294k
versus about
$213k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Anduril Industries
Anduril Industries is a defense technology company that builds advanced hardware and software systems for national security, including autonomous drones, surveillance systems, and the Lattice AI command platform.
Anduril Industries currently has
900 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$166,000–$220,000
across 857 roles with salary data.
The Lead Scientist, Strategic Defense joins the Strategic Defense team to lead the technical definition, architecture, integration, and validation of Integrated Air and Missile Defense capabilities. This hands-on engineering role involves owning critical elements of the end-to-end engagement chain, specifically fire control and dynamic sensor tasking. You will translate operational mission needs into system behaviors, develop architectures, and conduct engineering trades to create resilient, interoperable kill chains against complex air and missile threats. Key responsibilities include building modeling and simulation environments, performing quantitative performance analyses, and integrating sensors and effectors through open-system architectures. Required skills include experience with Python, MATLAB/Simulink, and C++, alongside expertise in sensor fusion, tracking, and battle management. The role solves the technical challenge of enabling machine-speed sensing and decision-making in contested environments.
Lead system and mission architecture for end-to-end IAMD kill chains spanning sensing, tracking, and fire-control execution.
Define fire-control functionality including track requirements, sensor-to-shooter interfaces, timing budgets, and engagement-sequence logic.
Develop dynamic sensor-tasking approaches to coordinate distributed sensors based on threat priority and resource availability.
Translate operational concepts and customer needs into testable system requirements, behaviors, and performance measures.
Build and use modeling and simulation environments to evaluate architectures, algorithms, and system-of-systems behavior.
Work directly with software engineers to implement battle-management, fire-control, and decision-support capabilities.
Integrate government, commercial, and allied sensors and effectors through open-system architectures.
Plan and execute software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, laboratory, range, and live-fire integration and test activities.
What we're looking for
10–15 years of engineering experience developing, integrating, testing, or fielding complex defense, aerospace, radar, missile, weapon, battle-management, or command-and-control systems.
A sustained record of hands-on technical work in systems engineering, software engineering, controls, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, radar engineering, modeling and simulation, or integration and test.
Demonstrated engineering experience with fire-control systems, engagement chains, weapon assignment, sensor-to-shooter integration, timing and latency, or safety interlocks.
Demonstrated experience with sensor tasking or resource management, including task planning, revisit scheduling, search and track allocation, and multi-sensor coordination.
Experience developing and analyzing end-to-end system architectures that integrate sensors, command-and-control nodes, fire-control elements, communications networks, and effectors.
Experience conducting quantitative engineering trades and performance analysis using Python, MATLAB/Simulink, C++, or equivalent analytical environments.
Bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, or another relevant technical field.
Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.