The Air Force Just Awarded Its First Fighter Contract to a New Company Since the 1970s. Anduril's Hiring Data Shows How Hard It Will Be to Deliver.

A New Fighter, From a New Company

The U.S. Air Force awarded production contracts to Anduril Industries and General Atomics on June 17, 2026, moving the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program from prototype competition into full-scale manufacturing. Anduril's YFQ-44A, soon to drop the "Y" prefix and become the FQ-44A, will enter production alongside General Atomics' FQ-42A, making this the first time since the 1970s that a new company has won a fighter aircraft program, said Mark Shushnar, Anduril's vice president for autonomous airpower.

The CCA program sits inside the Air Force's Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems. The concept: jet-powered uncrewed aircraft flying alongside manned fighters to handle strike, surveillance, and electronic warfare in contested airspace. The Air Force wants up to 1,000 Increment 1 CCA drones and plans to begin fielding them before 2030. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink put the near-term target at more than 150 combat-capable CCAs by the end of the decade.

The production contracts cover three lots of drone wingmen, though Air Force Col. Timothy Helfrich, the portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, declined to say how many aircraft each lot includes or what each costs. The Department of War's FY2027 budget request seeks nearly $1 billion for CCA procurement, and Helfrich told Defense One in March that the program is beating its goal of pricing each drone at roughly one-third the cost of an F-35.

Both companies reached the production decision after bruising prototype campaigns. General Atomics' YFQ-42A crashed in April at the company's California airport after an autopilot program error, halting flight tests for more than a month. Anduril's push for a semi-autonomous first flight (takeoff and landing by push of a button, no stick or throttle) delayed its YFQ-44A's maiden sortie by months. The aircraft finally flew in late October 2025 at a California test location, and every subsequent test has used the same semi-autonomous approach, said Jason Levin, Anduril's senior vice president of engineering.

The Air Force is keeping the autonomy software competition separate from the airframe contracts. Six companies (Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Shield AI, Northrop Grumman, and RTX Collins) received a baseline six-year contract vehicle to develop mission-autonomy software. Three of those vendors (Anduril, Shield AI, and RTX Collins) received additional production contracts and will compete to build the final autonomy package, with a second selection after an initial six-month performance review and a final decision expected by summer 2027. The Air Force will pay the full software license fee only if a vendor delivers combat capability aligned with warfighter feedback.

For Anduril, the production award triggers an immediate, practical problem: building the people and processes to manufacture autonomous combat aircraft at scale. That challenge is already visible in the company's hiring.

Rhode Island's Factory Floor

Anduril's Quonset Point facility has become the company's primary hub for scaling autonomous aircraft production, and the hiring data makes that clear. Zero G Talent's board shows 160 Anduril roles added in the past seven days alone, with the newest listing a Senior Manufacturing Test Engineer, Electrical, based in Quonset, paying $111,000 to $147,000 per year.

That figure sits within a broader band the company is paying for manufacturing test talent in the state:

The spread tells you something. Anduril is competing for a narrow pool of engineers who can do hardware test on electro-mechanical systems in a manufacturing environment, and it is paying a premium to pull them into defense production.

The job descriptions back that up. The Lead Manufacturing Test Engineer role at Quonset requires seven or more years of experience in test design for electro-mechanical hardware, proficiency in Python, MATLAB, or shell scripting, and fluency with CAN, Ethernet, RS485, and PCIe. The posting calls for someone who can build automated test systems from component-level validation through full-system factory acceptance testing, lead a small team, and manage escalations to leadership with risk mitigation plans. A separate Senior Manufacturing Test Engineer listing asks for the same core skills with an emphasis on developing high-fidelity automated test procedures at both the component and system level.

These are not generic manufacturing roles. The postings demand experience with LabVIEW or TestStand, sensor and actuator characterization, root cause analysis, and the ability to prototype test setups from scratch. Preferred qualifications include maritime robotics experience, work with electrical systems up to 400VDc, subsea cable splicing, and familiarity with pressure vessels. The overlap with Anduril's autonomous underwater vehicle program is deliberate: the Quonset facility supports the Dive family of maritime products, and the test infrastructure being built there is designed to scale across vehicle sizes.

Anduril's own careers page confirms the facility's role: the Quonset Point site is the company's newest production facility for maritime systems, and the manufacturing and field operations teams there are expanding to meet demand from the US and allied militaries.

Production-side roles round out the picture. Indeed lists Production Coordinator positions in North Kingstown at $26.92 to $40.38 per hour. Together, these listings trace a production operation moving from prototype into rated manufacturing, with test engineering as the bottleneck function.

What Anduril is building in Rhode Island is not a research lab. It is a factory floor that needs people who can make autonomous systems pass repeatable, automated tests at volume. The salaries reflect how hard those people are to find.

What the Job Postings Reveal

The specific skills Anduril is hiring for tell you more about the difficulty of building drone wingmen at scale than any press release. These aren't generic aerospace roles. They map directly to the problems that make autonomous combat aircraft unlike anything the defense industry has mass-produced before.

Start with the Senior Manufacturing Test Engineer role for the Fury Launch Team in Ashville, Ohio. The posting calls for seven or more years in production test engineering, preferably in aerospace, with a bachelor's in mechanical, aerospace, electrical, or manufacturing engineering. The salary range ($113,000 to $149,000) sits above the median for comparable roles in the region, a signal that Anduril is competing for experienced people and knows it.

But the responsibilities are where the real story is. The role requires someone who can design test plans, procedures, and automated test systems for aircraft components and systems, then validate and deploy those systems on the production line. That's not lab work. That's building the quality infrastructure for a factory that has to produce autonomous aircraft reliably, unit after unit, with the kind of repeatability the Air Force expects from a rated program. The posting also demands root cause analysis on failures during testing, cross-functional collaboration with engineering and production teams, and documentation that meets regulatory standards. Each requirement points to a company that knows its production line will surface novel failure modes and needs people who can diagnose them in real time.

The preferred qualifications add another layer. Familiarity with test automation tools. Understanding of electrical and mechanical systems in aircraft production. And notably, experience with low observable (LO) and survivability testing is listed as a plus. That last item is specific to stealth technology, the kind of work relevant to aircraft designed to survive contested airspace. It's a small line in a job posting, but it tells you Anduril is hiring for the full envelope of what a CCA has to do, not just fly autonomously.

Then there's the Staff Flight Test Engineer role for mission autonomy on the Fury UAS, based in Costa Mesa, California. This position demands 12 years of flight testing experience with a focus on autonomous or remotely piloted systems, and it pays $166,000 to $220,000. The responsibilities center on designing test plans that challenge autonomous systems across simulated mission profiles, analyzing data to validate performance, and iterating on autonomy algorithms. The posting explicitly calls for coordinating with private and government test ranges.

The gap between the Ohio and California roles is itself instructive. The Ashville position is about manufacturing quality, making sure each aircraft that rolls off the line works. The Costa Mesa position is about pushing the autonomy itself to its limits in flight. Anduril needs both simultaneously, which is what makes this hiring surge unusual. Most defense contractors scale manufacturing test and flight test on different timelines. Anduril is staffing both at once, suggesting the Fury program is moving from prototype validation into early production without the usual pause between phases.

The company is hiring across the full stack of production, from NDT inspectors and metrology engineers in Santa Ana to quality engineers and hydraulic assembly technicians. This isn't a single team scaling up. It's an entire manufacturing organization being built in parallel.

The security clearance requirement running through every posting is the final constraint. Every candidate must be eligible for a U.S. security clearance, and the flight test role requires Top Secret. That shrinks the available talent pool significantly. You can't just hire from the commercial drone sector and plug people in. You need engineers who already hold clearances or can obtain them, people who have worked in defense before, who understand the classification boundaries around autonomy software, stealth materials, and mission systems.

What Anduril's postings collectively describe is a production challenge that doesn't have a clean precedent. Building a stealthy, autonomous aircraft at rate requires merging aerospace manufacturing discipline with software-era iteration speed. The job requirements (test automation, root cause analysis, cross-functional troubleshooting, LO testing, and mission autonomy validation) are the specific competencies that bridge that gap. And the fact that Anduril is hiring for all of them at the same time, across multiple sites, tells you the company believes the CCA program has crossed the line from development into production. The Air Force's contract decision didn't just validate the aircraft. It triggered the hard part.

Two Hubs, One Strategy

Anduril is running two distinct manufacturing plays at once, and the split tells you exactly what each site is built to do.

In Ohio, Arsenal-1, the company's hyperscale facility in Pickaway County just south of Columbus, is gearing up for high-rate production of the FQ-44A. The company has said the facility is designed to produce tens of thousands of autonomous defense systems per year and could support as many as 4,000 jobs at full ramp, with a projected $2 billion economic impact on the region. Ohio's pitch was the state's existing aerospace manufacturing base and federal-mission infrastructure, and the roles posted there (production supervisors, quality control supervisors, and facilities managers) reflect a site being stood up for volume assembly.

Rhode Island plays a different position on the same team. The Quonset Point facility is Anduril's maritime production hub, and its manufacturing and field operations teams are expanding to support the Dive family of products for the U.S. and allied customers. The open roles skew toward manufacturing test engineering and field testing, the kind of positions that validate autonomous systems before they ship, not the positions that churn out units by the thousands.

The division of labor is consistent: Ohio is where Anduril builds at scale, Rhode Island is where it proves the build works. Arsenal-1's projected output volume demands production engineers who can stand up lines, manage throughput, and keep tolerances tight across long runs. Quonset's maritime focus and its emphasis on field operations mean the site needs engineers who can test autonomous systems in operational conditions, not just on a factory floor. Both hubs feed the same autonomous-aircraft pipeline, but they sit at different points on it — Ohio pushes units out the door, Rhode Island makes sure those units function once they leave it.

The Broader Talent War

Anduril's Rhode Island hiring push is one visible front in a much larger scramble. The entire defense industry is trying to staff up for autonomous-systems production at a moment when the talent pool is too small, the clearance requirements are steep, and the competition cuts across every major contractor.

The numbers tell the scale. The aerospace and defense sector will need an estimated 4 million jobs filled over the next decade, per the Department of Defense. Deloitte's 2026 outlook puts the manufacturing skills gap at 3.8 million positions between 2025 and 2033, roughly half of which could go vacant without intervention. The A&D workforce grew 4.8% from 2022 to 2023, outpacing the national average of 1.7%, yet turnover hit 13% in 2023, well above the 3.8% U.S. average. Every new role an Anduril or General Atomics fills is a role someone else just lost.

The competition is concentrated. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, with a combined market cap above $250 billion, have nearly 6,000 open positions between them. Ten other major contractors aim to add roughly 37,000 positions total, about 10% of their collective workforce. Anduril's salaries are competitive but not outliers. Talenbrium's 2025 benchmarking data shows senior systems engineers across the sector earning $120,000, senior aerospace engineers $140,000, and senior data scientists $130,000, all trending upward 7–15% year over year.

What makes the autonomous-aircraft niche harder than general defense manufacturing is the intersection of skills required. The DoD's own Software Modernization Strategy, signed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense in February 2022, calls for DevSecOps pipelines, continuous authorization, and software-factory ecosystems as standard practice. That means a manufacturing test engineer on a CCA line isn't just checking airframe tolerances; they're validating software-defined systems that update continuously, require cybersecurity sign-off at each build, and must meet airworthiness standards that don't yet fully exist for autonomous platforms. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering has added AI-specific test and evaluation courses to its credentialing pipeline, a signal that the workforce gap is acute enough to warrant new training infrastructure.

The geographic dimension sharpens the competition. Talenbrium's location analysis identifies Huntsville, Alabama, as the tightest labor market for systems and test engineers, with a 16.0 supply ratio and 7.0% CAGR in demand. Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. all show vacancy rates between 6% and 8%. Anduril's Quonset Point facility sits outside these hotspots, which gives it some insulation but also means it's drawing from a smaller regional pool and competing on compensation and mission appeal.

The DoD has thrown funding at the problem. Nearly $100 million went to 28 public-private apprenticeship partnerships through the Closing the Skills Gap grant program, training over 92,000 people. Maine launched a $6.5 million initiative linking General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, Pratt & Whitney, and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard with community colleges to fill 7,500 positions. The Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing program puts veterans through 16-week courses in additive manufacturing, CNC machining, and welding. These are real efforts, but they're measured in years. Anduril's CCA production timeline is measured in months.

The companies that win this talent war won't be the ones with the best job postings. They'll be the ones that build internal pipelines fast enough to offset the structural shortfall, and that figure out how to clear, train, and retain engineers who can manufacture aircraft whose most critical systems are made of code.

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