Principal Design Engineer

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 In the Space Special Programs team, we build spacecraft and space systems which serve a wide variety of functions in the space architecture. At a time when space superiority can no longer be taken for granted and with space systems proliferating at an incredible rate, the Space Special Programs team provides advanced, mission critical capabilities to our customer base to be able to more effectively operate and survive within this expanding environment with limited personnel. Working across product, engineering, sales, logistics, operations, and mission success, the Space Special Programs team develops, tests, deploys, and operates new, unique, space capabilities to drive mission success in challenging operational environments. ABOUT THE JOB Anduril is seeking a Senior Design Engineer to join the Space Special Programs team at our Chantilly, VA location. Here you will work on core technologies, subsystems, spacecraft, and complete space systems supporting the Space Special Programs team and core mission. This development includes but is not limited to optical systems, batteries, mechanisms, control systems, and sensors. The primary function of this role is to be a highly experienced resource to help implement and influence the team’s development roadmap, be a resource for mentoring and growing the engineering team, and to be an individual contributor in both technical and strategic areas. This role requires high ownership and frequent collaboration with other core disciplines. The ideal candidate would be practical, hands-on and a self-starter, with significant experience designing, analyzing, building, and operating spacecraft mechanical, opto-mechanical, and both passive and active mechanisms – experience machining components is a significant plus. High growth potential is possible as well as additional leadership opportunities. WHAT YOU’LL DO Execute rapid evaluation of engineering concepts in a wide range of fields Create solutions (with analysis, design, and experimentation) to blue-sky engineering problems and targeted mission needs alike Design, analyze, implement, and test complex electro-mechanical systems Maintain High level system ownership with large levels of professional autonomy Participate in design reviews, integration and test campaigns, launch-site and on-orbit operations campaigns Build prototypes, analyze failures, and transition successful projects into production Mentor engineers and help them learn the art of small spacecraft design and test – teach them your mistakes so they won’t need to repeat them Support critical hardware demonstrations with customers as needed Travel to test sites as needed Use first principles, physics, and personal experience as a basis for every decision Identify partners in industry to engage with, and manage early vendor relationships REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS Experience in an immersive technical project (professional settings) Demonstrated leadership skills 20+ years of mechanical and mechanism design experience in a professional setting 10+ years designing systems for spacecraft and associated space systems Experience in ground-up system design and any 3-D CAD Hands-on assembly, prototyping, testing, and performance characterization of mechanisms desi…