Anduril's Bellevue office was Meta's 3 months ago. Now it's ground zero for a new talent war

The Skyline Tower Sublease: Defense Tech Moves into Big AI's Living Room

Anduril Industries leased 39,851 square feet at Skyline Tower in downtown Bellevue through a direct sublease with Meta Platforms, the Broderick Group reported, a deal that plants a defense-contractor flag in a building better known as an AI-industry stronghold. The 24-story tower at 10900 NE Fourth St. sits in a dense cluster of Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta engineering talent on the Eastside.

The sublease is structured as a talent play, not a real-estate transaction. Anduril's Bellevue office, its first physical presence on the Eastside, targets engineers who already live within commuting distance of Skyline Tower: autonomy, embedded-systems, perception, and mission-software specialists the same Big AI employers are fighting to retain. Zero G Talent's board already lists a Staff Software Engineer, Robotics role tied to Bellevue at $254,000 to $336,000 a year, confirming the hiring push is active.

For Anduril, the sublease removes the buildout lag of a ground-up lease and puts the company into a move-in-ready office where recruiters can start calling candidates quickly. The Puget Sound Business Journal broke the deal; GeekWire confirmed the square footage and sublease structure.

Why Anduril Can Afford to Hire Everyone

Anduril's Bellevue expansion isn't speculative; the company can already pay for it. On May 13, 2026, the defense firm closed a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation, more than doubling the $30.5 billion mark set less than a year earlier when Founders Fund led a $2.5 billion round with the largest check the firm had ever written. The Series H, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, pushes Anduril's lifetime capital raised past $11 billion, according to TechCrunch, a tier very few defense startups, or startups of any kind, have reached.

Revenue matters more for hiring than valuation. CEO Brian Schimpf disclosed in the announcement blog post that Anduril's 2025 revenue doubled to $2.2 billion. Doubling top line in a single year gives the company actual cash flow to support headcount growth at the scale Bellevue represents, not projected runway, but current-income capacity. Anduril already has roughly 375 employees in the Seattle region, GeekWire reported, and the new Skyline Tower lease adds space to roughly double its local footprint.

That financial position lets Anduril compete on salary for the autonomy, embedded systems, and mission-software engineers it needs in Bellevue. Zero G Talent's board data shows the company just listed that role in the $254,000–$336,000 annual range, numbers backed by revenue, not venture promises. The $2.2 billion in 2025 revenue, paired with the fresh $5 billion war chest, means Anduril can match or exceed what Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta offer for similar control-systems and perception talent.

The timing of the raise lines up directly with the contract cadence that justifies it. In the weeks around the Series H close, Anduril announced a spot on the U.S. Air Force's $1.8 billion Andromeda space-domain awareness contract, a Dutch Ministry of Defence deal, a U.S. Army battle-manager software contract built on its Lattice platform, and participation in the space-based Golden Dome missile-defense program. Those aren't slide-deck promises; they're revenue pipelines Schimpf can point to when Thrive and a16z wire $5 billion. And they're the programs that will run out of Bellevue, which is what makes the office more than a talent flex. It's a delivery center backed by a balance sheet that can absorb the cost before the contracts bill out.

Connected Warfare: The Technical Moat Behind the Bellevue Bet

Anduril's Seattle expansion isn't a satellite office doing peripheral work. The company has designated the city as its connected warfare headquarters, the division that builds the software backbone tying together drones, ships, sensors, and command systems into a single operational network. That distinction matters because it explains why Anduril needs this specific engineering pool, and why the Bellevue office sits at the center of the company's technical roadmap rather than at the edges.

The core product is Lattice OS, Anduril's AI-powered operating system that ingests thousands of data streams and renders them as a real-time, 3D command-and-control environment. Lattice powers the company's family of autonomous systems, from collaborative combat aircraft to the autonomous warships Anduril is developing with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries under the Navy's Modular Attack Surface Craft program. The connected warfare division in Seattle focuses on military communication, networking, and the integration work that makes Lattice function as a joint platform rather than a single-system controller.

The job listings make the technical scope explicit. A Software Engineer on the Mission Command team, the team closest to military end-users, builds and deploys Lattice Mesh, the networking layer that allows Anduril's systems to operate in contested, disconnected environments where traditional communications infrastructure doesn't exist. The role spans networking, autonomy, systems integration, robotics, and distributed data layers. Engineers travel 10% to 30% of the time, deploying and testing capabilities directly in the field with military customers. The salary range runs $129,000 to $253,000, plus equity.

This is the moat. Anduril isn't hiring generalist web developers in Bellevue. It's hiring engineers who can build resilient mesh networks, fuse sensor data across platforms, and write software that runs on the tactical edge, the kind of work that sits at the intersection of distributed systems, robotics, and real-time perception. Those skills are scarce, and they overlap directly with what Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have been hiring for in autonomy and spatial-computing programs. The Bellevue office puts Anduril in a position to pull from the same talent pool that Big AI has been cultivating.

Zero G Talent's board currently lists 225 Anduril roles added in the past 7 days, with openings like the robotics position in Bellevue at $254,000 to $336,000 annually. That hiring velocity signals the connected warfare division is scaling fast, and that the technical work in Seattle is central enough to the company's defense mission to warrant that level of investment.

Why Big AI Is Vacating Space Defense Tech Wants

Meta subleasing its Skyline Tower space to Anduril is one visible data point in a broader shift across Seattle's office market. Big AI companies expanded footprints aggressively during 2021 and 2022 to house hiring surges; some of that space is now available as those companies adjusted headcounts. The office space those adjustments unlocked is available at rates far below what a company would pay to build out new. For a firm with fresh capital and urgent hiring targets, taking over a sublease from a retreating competitor is cheaper and faster than ground-up construction.

The real opportunity for Anduril isn't the square footage. It is the talent pool now floating in the same market. Engineers laid off from Big AI employers, or still working there but watching their teams shrink and their stock packages deflate, are evaluating once looked like a niche career detour with below-market pay. Anduril's compensation packages have collapsed that assumption. Zero G Talent's board shows the company posting a Staff Software Engineer, Robotics role in Bellevue at $254,000–$336,000 per year, a range that competes directly with senior-band offers at Amazon and Microsoft for similar systems-level work.

The engineers Anduril is absorbing in Bellevue aren't career military contractors. They are software and robotics people trained in Big AI's infrastructure, comfortable with large codebases, continuous deployment, and hardware-software integration. Those skills transfer directly to connected warfare. The vacancy Meta created didn't just open an office. It opened a hiring lane.

The Pacific Northwest Corridor: From Seattle Shipyards to Bellevue Autonomy Labs

The Bellevue office doesn't exist in isolation. It's the second anchor point in a Pacific Northwest footprint that stretches from Seattle's industrial waterfront to the Eastside's software corridor, a geography Anduril is wiring together into a single connected-warfare engineering pipeline.

On the Seattle side, the company has been building out shipyard ambitions tied to its autonomous undersea programs. The work is hardware-heavy: large-volume manufacturing of unmanned underwater vehicles, pressure hulls, and sensor payloads that need physical proximity to saltwater testing and port infrastructure. That's a fundamentally different profile from what runs out of Skyline Tower, 10 miles east across Lake Washington.

The Bellevue lab is where the software lives. Autonomy stacks, perception pipelines, and mission-planning systems (the code that makes Anduril's hardware coordinate in the field). Engineering roles tied to the new office target the same control-systems talent pool that Amazon, Microsoft, and the remaining Meta teams recruit from. The two sites split the company's Pacific Northwest workforce along a hardware-software axis, with the existing regional headcount already in the hundreds.

Zero G Talent's board currently lists 225 open Anduril roles added in the past week alone, with robotics and software positions split between Bellevue and Southern California. The concentration of new Bellevue listings signals where the company expects the fastest headcount growth in the near term.

The corridor model matters because connected warfare, Anduril's core thesis, requires tight coupling between the platforms built in Seattle and the intelligence layered on in Bellevue. A perception algorithm tested on Eastside compute clusters has to run on hardware that ships out of a Seattle waterfront facility. Shortening that loop is the point of building both nodes in the same metro. The Meta sublease didn't just give Anduril a Bellevue address. It gave the company a second pole in a regional system designed to close the distance between code and steel.

Is Anduril Hedging Its California Bet?

Bloomberg reported in June that the 634,000-square-foot Costa Mesa campus Anduril occupies as its headquarters is on the market in a deal that could fetch roughly $400 million. The listing comes from the property's owners, Invesco Ltd. and SteelWave LLC, not from Anduril itself. But the timing raises a question the company hasn't answered directly: why does a defense firm with 13 years left on its headquarters lease, a $1 billion Long Beach expansion under construction, and a stated commitment to Southern California's workforce need to watch its flagship building test the market at all?

The listing price is extrapolated from a $251 million mortgage Invesco and SteelWave secured against the property in September, assuming a standard 65% loan-to-value ratio. The property was acquired for $65 million in 2017 and underwent extensive renovations completed in 2023. Anduril has leased the entire complex since 2021. Stream Realty Partners' Marty Pupil told Bloomberg the sale reflects Anduril's creditworthiness more than any weakness in the property: the campus is 100% occupied by a tenant with long-term federal government contracts and a $61 billion valuation.

Anduril's official position is that California remains central to its future. The company announced a $1 billion, 1.18-million-square-foot Long Beach campus in January, expected to create 5,500 jobs and open in mid-2027. Governor Newsom's office promoted the expansion as a vindication of Southern California's defense-tech leadership. Anduril's CEO has separately said he is open to building a weapons production hub outside the United States, citing regulatory friction.

The tension is real. Anduril's job board shows active hiring in both geographies:

The Bellevue roles pay more. The California roles sit inside a campus whose owners are testing a $400 million exit.

The Costa Mesa sale closes no earlier than late 2026, and Anduril has not said it would relocate even if the building changes hands. But the Bellevue office lease, signed the same year the headquarters hits the market, tells a parallel story: Anduril is building optionality into its geography, one square foot at a time.

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