A factory campus that hasn't broken ground yet is hiring 5,500 people. The engineers who can write motion-planning algorithms in Rust and solder micro-electronics on a night shift are the reason.
What a $61 Billion Valuation Buys
Anduril Industries closed a $5 billion Series H round on May 13, 2026, at a $61 billion valuation, the largest private funding round in defense technology history. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the round, more than doubling the company's valuation from $30.5 billion, set just 11 months earlier in a Founders Fund-led Series G that was 8x oversubscribed. Total capital raised since Palmer Luckey founded the company in 2017 now exceeds $11 billion.
CEO Brian Schimpf said in the funding announcement that Anduril will "aggressively" invest in manufacturing, research, and infrastructure. The company's workforce nearly doubled in 2025, and Zero G Talent's board shows 242 Anduril roles added in the past week alone, spanning sourcing engineers in Huntsville, program managers in Costa Mesa, and micro-electronics technicians in Hudson, New Hampshire.
The valuation has roughly doubled every year for four straight years: $8.5 billion in December 2022, $14 billion in August 2024, $30.5 billion in June 2025, and $61 billion now. Revenue followed the same curve: $2.2 billion in 2025, up from roughly $1 billion in 2024 and $500 million in 2023. At the current valuation, the company trades at approximately 28x trailing revenue, a multiple that dwarfs the 1.6–2.7x ratios of legacy primes like Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman.
Three contract wins anchor those revenue figures. A 10-year, $20 billion Army enterprise agreement signed in March 2026 consolidated roughly 120 separate contract vehicles into one. The Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program picked Anduril's Fury drone over bids from Lockheed, Northrop, and Boeing. And the company participates in the $185 billion Golden Dome missile defense system. Separately, the Department of Defense announced in May 2026 that it would buy more than 10,000 low-cost hypersonic missiles from Anduril and three partner companies over the next three years.
The Series H funds the Arsenal-1 factory campus, a planned 1.18 million square foot manufacturing complex in Long Beach, California, expected to create roughly 5,500 direct jobs. Arsenal-1 is central to Anduril's pitch that it can produce hardware at a pace the defense industry hasn't seen before. Fury drone production at an Arsenal-1 facility in Ohio began in March 2026, ahead of schedule. The Long Beach campus will expand that model.
No S-1 has been filed. Luckey has said an IPO will come "in the next few years," tied to profitability and Arsenal-1 proving out at scale. The Series H removes any near-term pressure to go public, which means the hiring wave runs on private capital and production targets, not quarterly earnings.
Long Beach: The Defense-Tech Hub Nobody Expected
Long Beach isn't the first place most engineers picture when they think defense-tech hiring. That's changing fast. Anduril's planned Arsenal-1 campus in the city is expected to support roughly 5,500 direct jobs, and the company is already posting at a pace that signals the buildout is more than a press release. As of May 2026, Glassdoor lists 365 open Anduril positions in Long Beach. Indeed shows 420.
Production Technicians and Production Coordinators dominate the Indeed listings, which makes sense: Arsenal-1 is first and foremost a factory. Anduril builds autonomous systems — drones, underwater vehicles, sensor platforms — and someone has to assemble, test, and ship them. But the hiring doesn't stop at the factory floor. Analyst roles, program managers, and sourcing engineers all appear in the Long Beach pipeline, suggesting the campus will house manufacturing, logistics, and program oversight under one roof.
Salary data from Levels.fyi puts Anduril's total compensation range at $87,063 on the low end for a Chemical Engineer and up to $735,000 for a Software Engineering Manager. ZipRecruiter postings for engineer roles in Long Beach specifically list ranges between $87,000 and $188,000. Those figures compete with what Southern California's aerospace and defense primes pay, and in some cases exceed what smaller startups can offer, especially when you factor in Anduril's benefits package, which includes fully funded life insurance, long-term illness coverage, and a pension plan with a competitive match.
What makes Long Beach notable isn't just the volume of jobs. It's the concentration. Anduril's campus will co-locate engineering, manufacturing, and operations in a single facility, a model borrowed from Tesla's Gigafactories but rare in defense, where production typically spreads across dozens of subcontractor sites. For someone considering a move into defense-tech, that concentration means joining a hub that will likely pull in suppliers, partners, and adjacent employers over the next several years.
The city's existing aerospace workforce, a legacy of Boeing's Long Beach operations and the broader Southern California defense corridor, gives Anduril a recruiting base most defense startups would envy. The question for engineers and operators watching from the outside isn't whether Long Beach is becoming a defense-tech center. It's whether they want to get in before the hiring wave peaks.
The Roles Anduril Can't Fill Fast Enough
Anduril's hiring surge isn't a standard software-company expansion. The company builds physical systems — autonomous air vehicles, cruise missiles, underwater drones — and the roles reflect that. The job mix spans embedded AI, robotics software, sensor fusion, manufacturing engineering, and hardware test, a combination most Silicon Valley firms never touch.
Start with the autonomy stack. Anduril's Air Dominance & Strike team, which develops the Fury unmanned fighter jet and the Barracuda cruise missile family, is hiring robotics software engineers to build what it calls "Lattice for Mission Autonomy," the platform that lets swarms of heterogeneous robots collaborate on missions. A Robotics Software Engineer role on that team pays between $191,000 and $253,000 and requires C++ or Rust in a Linux environment, plus experience with motion planning, perception, localization, or controls. The listing is blunt about the scope: engineers own feature development for things like "terminal-phase autonomy for various air vehicles" and build test plans on live surrogates.
That's not an outlier. A Robotics Software Integration Engineer role on the same team, focused on verification and automated testing, lists a range of $166,000 to $220,000 and asks for four-plus years of software testing experience in aerospace and defense, with knowledge of hardware-in-the-loop testing infrastructure. A Senior Robotics Software Engineer position focused on sensor fusion pays the same $191,000–$253,000 band.
Every listing requires comfort working with electrical and mechanical systems, and most prefer candidates who've programmed for embedded and physical devices. Anduril's careers page frames it directly: the company wants people who work "in the office or in the field."
The manufacturing side is growing faster. Open roles include Manufacturing Engineer, Senior Manufacturing Engineer, and Head of Production for missiles, the last listed at $292,000–$350,000. A Head of Hardware Test role in Costa Mesa pays $254,000–$336,000 and covers functional safety, hardware-in-the-loop systems, and verification and validation across drone programs.
The technician layer is expanding too. Zero G Talent listings show Process Technician roles in Hudson, New Hampshire, at $30–$37/hour, and Micro-electronics Technician positions at $27–$37/hour. These are hands-on production jobs, the kind of positions a factory campus exists to fill.
Across all levels, one requirement appears in nearly every listing: eligibility for a U.S. Top Secret security clearance. That's a hard filter that rules out a large share of the tech talent pool and gives candidates who already hold a clearance a significant advantage.
The breadth is the point. Anduril isn't just hiring machine learning engineers and calling it defense-tech. It's hiring the full stack, from the person writing motion-planning algorithms in Rust to the technician soldering micro-electronics on a night shift in New Hampshire. That's what building physical autonomous systems at scale actually requires, and it's why the company added 242 roles to its board in a single week.
Anduril vs. the Competition for the Same Engineers
Anduril's hiring surge isn't happening in a vacuum. The company pulls from the same talent pools as Palantir, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX, and the competition is getting sharper.
Zero G Talent's board shows Anduril added 242 roles in the past week, outpacing Northrop Grumman's 36 and running close to SpaceX's 103. That volume signals urgency. Anduril is building Arsenal-1 and scaling production of autonomous systems simultaneously, which means it needs people faster than the primes or even SpaceX can absorb them.
The roles each company is hiring for reveal different strategies. Anduril's latest listings skew toward sourcing engineering, mission autonomy program management, and micro-electronics technicians, a mix that reflects a company trying to vertically integrate hardware production while building out AI-driven software. Salaries on the board range from $27–$37/hour for technician roles in Hudson, New Hampshire, to $132,000–$198,000 for a Program Manager in Mission Autonomy in Costa Mesa. That spread matters: Anduril competes for both factory-floor talent and senior systems engineers, a breadth most defense contractors don't attempt.
Northrop Grumman's board presence is smaller but targets a different tier. Its open roles include a Staff Engineer in Guidance Navigation Controls in El Segundo at $177,000–$265,600 and a Supplier Quality Manager pulling $175,400–$262,300 across multiple sites. These are senior, clearance-heavy positions, the kind Northrop has always competed for. The company isn't trying to out-hire Anduril on volume. It's defending its hold on experienced aerospace and defense engineers who've spent careers inside the traditional contractor ecosystem.
SpaceX plays a different game entirely. Its 103 recent postings include entry-level Laser Production Technicians in Redmond at $22–$26.50/hour and a Production Project Engineer for Starlink in Bastrop. SpaceX's hiring engine runs on throughput: it needs manufacturing operators and project engineers who can work at the pace of a launch cadence. The compensation is lower than Anduril's senior roles, but SpaceX offers something Anduril can't yet match: flight heritage and a public profile that draws applicants in bulk.
Palantir competes at the software and data layer. Its hiring for forward-deployed engineers and AI integration roles puts it in direct competition with Anduril for machine learning talent. Palantir's pitch is deployment speed and government access. Anduril's is hardware, building the physical systems that Palantir's software might one day run on.
The result is a fragmented talent market where no single employer dominates across all levels. Anduril's financial muscle and Arsenal-1 buildout let it bid aggressively, but it's still a 10-year-old company asking engineers to bet on a production facility that hasn't broken ground yet. Northrop Grumman offers stability and clearance pipelines. SpaceX offers scale and visibility. Palantir offers software-first roles with less hardware risk.
For engineers weighing offers, the decision increasingly comes down to what kind of risk they want: the startup-scale uncertainty of a company racing to build its first major factory, or the bureaucratic weight of a prime that will still be awarding cost-plus contracts in 2040.
The Talent Market Has Already Decided
If you've been watching defense-tech from the sidelines, curious but unsure whether the sector actually hires people like you, Anduril's trajectory over the past year should settle the question. The 242 roles added in the past seven days alone span those same three locations. That's not a press release. That's a live hiring signal.
The range of those roles matters as much as the volume. Anduril isn't just recruiting software engineers to sit in front of IDEs. The listings include micro-electronics technicians, product sourcing engineers, and process technicians, roles that sit at the intersection of hardware, manufacturing, and mission-critical software. If your background is in embedded systems, manufacturing operations, or supply chain engineering, defense-tech has a place for you that pure-play software companies don't offer.
Salaries on the board reflect the urgency. Anduril's program manager roles are listed at $132,000–$198,000, and senior sourcing positions top $190,000. Process technician hourly rates run $27–$37, modest compared to the salaried engineering roles, but competitive for advanced manufacturing, especially in markets like southern New Hampshire where the cost of living hasn't caught up to the demand.
The broader context strengthens the case. Northrop Grumman added 36 roles in the same window, with senior engineering positions reaching $265,000. SpaceX, which operates in an adjacent lane, added 103. Defense-tech isn't a niche hiring story anymore, it's a sector-wide pull on the same talent pool that AI startups and commercial aerospace have been fighting over.
Anduril's Arsenal-1 campus won't finish building itself, and the Series H gives the company runway to keep hiring aggressively for years. The roles are live, the compensation is public, and the sector's momentum isn't theoretical, it's on the board right now. The only question left is whether the engineers Anduril needs will wait for the factory to break ground, or whether the factory will have to wait for them.
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