One Roof for Drones and Space
Anduril Industries is opening a large Long Beach campus that integrates defense drone and space engineering with flight-test and R&D teams under one roof, creating about 5,500 jobs, per Business Facilities. The Costa Mesa company’s move reshapes how the defense-tech disruptor deploys its engineers.
The company confirmed on January 22, 2026 that it would build at the Douglas Park business complex north of Long Beach Airport. California Construction News reported on January 26 a slightly larger footprint across Long Beach and Lakewood, suggesting the first figure covered only Douglas Park. Anduril’s announcement states the site will hold six distinct buildings. Anduril Industries designed the location to mass-produce autonomous weapons and surveillance tech while co-locating software, hardware, flight-test, and research staff. This build-out arrives as venture-backed defense startups pull billions in funding.
Anduril’s layout scraps the prime model that seals groups apart. Software engineers sit next to hardware engineers. Flight-test crews work with R&D specialists. Teams get on-site machine shops, testing facilities, and fabrication gear to design, build, and fly prototypes without leaving the property.
"That combination of history, talent, and industrial infrastructure makes Long Beach a natural place for Anduril to continue scaling its operations," the company said in its statement.
The city already carries the “Space Beach” label, a cluster around the airport that hosts Rocket Lab and other aerospace startups.
The Building Plan
The campus will cover about 1.1 million square feet in those six buildings at Douglas Park. Offices for software and admin take roughly 750,000 of those square feet, with 435,000 left for research and development. California Construction News placed the wider two-city footprint, including Lakewood, slightly above that, aligning with the sum of office and lab space plus surrounding land.
Space is central. Anduril extends its Lattice software into orbit, pairing modular payloads with autonomous systems for space-domain awareness and control. The company has worked with Space Systems Command since 2022, when it deployed SDANet in Maui. The new campus puts those space teams next to flight-test and fabrication resources. A dedicated space group builds integrated hardware and software for U.S. military and allied partners, targeting threats above the atmosphere.
Location drove the choice. Anduril said Long Beach sits close to Hawthorne and Torrance and a short drive from its Capistrano test site, letting teams iterate across sites. The city’s defense and manufacturing history, plus the existing startup portfolio, sealed it. Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s co-founder, once studied at Cal State Long Beach and built the Oculus Rift before moving to defense; his local roots mirror the company’s bet on the region.
Local officials read the announcement as economic validation. Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said the investment shows confidence in the city’s advanced manufacturing base, noting the campus arrives only because the workforce and industrial legacy already exist. Governor Gavin Newsom called Anduril’s California roots deep and said the project strengthens the state’s innovation ecosystem. City workforce programs with Long Beach Unified School District and local colleges aim to feed the high-skilled roles.
Construction starts in 2026, with the first building online by end of 2027. The Long Beach site joins Anduril’s broader industrial push, including a hyperscale plant in Ohio, but the Southern California campus is the first to co-locate drone and space flight-test talent at this scale. For engineers scanning the board, Anduril Industries posted 152 roles in the past week alone, a signal the hiring machine is already warm.
The Space Flight-Test Roles Redefining Defense Hiring
Anduril posted a Software Engineer, Systems Test role for its Space team, offering a mid-senior pay band for an engineer who builds cloud tools for automated space system test execution. The listing drew over 200 applicants. That single requisition shows how the company structures its space flight-test work: software people write the verification code that flies with the hardware.
The Long Beach campus will fold software developers, flight-test teams, and research specialists under one roof, but the job categories themselves already break the old defense template. Anduril's Space team develops fully integrated hardware and software systems, including Lattice for Space Missions and modular payloads, to address threats in a contested orbital domain. A systems test engineer there architects cloud-based software for automated test runs, data collection, remote monitoring, and fleet-level reporting. The posting asks for experience deploying automated test software for complex hardware in aerospace or robotics. You need eligibility for an active U.S. Secret clearance.
Hardware engineers on the same team build those modular payloads and software-defined spacecraft. Anduril's site describes integrated hardware for rendezvous, proximity operations, battle management, and mesh communications. At the new Long Beach facility, those engineers will share space with machine shops and fabrication equipment, not toss designs to a subcontractor. The campus plan puts hardware engineers next to the software writers and the flight-test crew.
Flight test at Anduril sits inside a Test and Evaluation group that spans all products, flight operations, and test range management. The team conducts ground and flight testing at private and government-owned ranges, then collects test data and runs initial analysis. That closes a loop legacy primes often stretch across months and separate buildings. At a traditional contractor, a flight test engineer might file a report up a chain while software fixes wait in another division.
Legacy primes historically split hardware design, software validation, and flight test into separate reporting lines, pushing integration late and adding latency through outsourced supply chains. Anduril’s teams ship capabilities in months, not years. The startup’s rapid scaling leaves legacy hiring curves behind.
The systems test posting carries equity grants on top, a package traditional primes rarely match at the same seniority. Engineers leaving big tech for defense startups see hefty pay premiums.
What makes these jobs different is daily proximity. A software engineer writing test scripts can walk to the bench where hardware gets built, then join the flight test crew at a range. Anduril's Long Beach layout forces that contact. Traditional primes keep those groups in separate campuses and security zones.
If you are weighing a move from a legacy aerospace silo, the Anduril space team requisitions show the new shape: write the test code, then watch it run on hardware you helped integrate. That crowd knows the model changed.
Southern California's Talent Squeeze
Anduril’s massive Long Beach build-out will add thousands of new jobs into a regional engineering pool already starving for talent. The project is expected to create about 5,500 jobs, as reported by Business Facilities and the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. That alone strains the market, but the real story is how neighboring primes and rocket firms reposition to keep benches full.
A Region Stretched Thin
Southern California's aerospace cluster runs deep, but it is stretched thin. The OHO H2 2025 Los Angeles aerospace engineering talent report found sustained, accelerated demand for aerospace engineers in LA, driven by increased defense budgets and global security demand, with continued VC investment accelerating the trend. Early-stage and scaling companies expanded fast, placing intense pressure on an already constrained talent market. The Southern Pacific Aerospace Defense Alliance (SPADA) exists to unite that ecosystem across industry, government, and academia. The Aerospace Summer Games, a regional athletic event, will welcome over 70 companies and 10,000 attendees in 2026, up from 52 organizations in 2023.
"Clients consistently report a shortage of engineers capable of true end-to-end ownership of business-critical aerospace systems," the OHO report found.
Hardware-led engineering remains the core demand, with genuine hands-on excellence at a premium. Embedded programming and low-level flight software skills prove equally difficult to secure. Employers prioritize engineers with full-lifecycle experience who can take systems from concept through build, test, and deployment. The 2–5 year experience band is the sweet spot, combining autonomy with openness to innovation. Engineers increasingly drift toward fast-paced, innovation-forward environments that offer real ownership and minimal bureaucracy.
Anduril's Compensation Weight
Anduril’s own hiring machine adds to the squeeze. Its live board shows a steady stream of roles anchored in Costa Mesa, its SoCal home base. Salary bands for those local postings run wide and high:
| Role / source | Location | Annual salary band (USD) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer, Systems Test (Space) — LinkedIn | Costa Mesa, CA | $166,000–$220,000 | Mid-senior, Secret eligibility |
| Senior Product Sourcing Engineer, Autonomous Airpower | Costa Mesa, CA | $146,000–$1,940,000 | Wide band |
| VP, Chief Security Officer | Costa Mesa, CA | $252,000–$400,000 | |
| Mission Systems Lead | Costa Mesa, CA | $292,000–$386,000 | |
| Anduril overall board median — Zero G Talent | Company-wide | $194,000 | 1,995 roles indexed |
| US Software Engineer median total — Levels.fyi Jul 2026 | US | $247,000 | L3 $206K, L7 $453K, high $480K |
| Glassdoor avg base | US | $139,496 | Base only |
The bands put mid-career engineers within reach of pay they might not see at a traditional contractor, pushing rivals to weigh potential over years of experience.
Legacy Primes and Rocket Firms Push Back
Legacy primes are not sitting still, though no confirmed direct poaching from them by Anduril exists. Boeing's Millennium Space Systems, a small-satellite unit, pitches a close-knit team and open environment where ideas cross disciplines. Its job posts include Supply Reliability Engineer oversight for raw materials and special processes. Northrop Grumman, a repeat Aerospace Summer Games champion, hosted the 2024 event at El Camino College after taking it over from SpaceX. SpaceX ran the last beach games in 2023.
Rocket firms in the same backyard feel the same pull. Relativity Space has posted Long Beach propulsion engineer jobs, reflecting the same talent demand. Relativity calls itself a place for builders with big ideas, pushing first-principles thinking. Both companies chase the embedded and flight-software talent OHO flagged as scarce.
What the 2026 Games Tell Us
The regional response mixes collaboration and competition. SPADA promotes a resilient workforce through industry-government-academia ties. The 2026 ASG's shift to a 501(c)(3) non-profit run collaboratively shows the community trying to build pipeline together. Yet the OHO report warns that companies offering real ownership and accelerated development will win the LA market through 2026 as aerospace and defense funding continues.
Anduril's integrated campus model, detailed on its own site, puts machine shops and flight-test under one roof. That structure is a magnet for the full-lifecycle engineer the region lacks. The legacy primes and rocket shops must match the speed or watch the talent walk to Long Beach.
The games will gather thousands of aerospace workers at El Camino College. The trophy goes to one company; the pay packages will decide which keep them.
Why Integrated Fabrication Beats the Prime Model
A video analysis lays out the old model: traditional programs take 10 or 15 years to reach a working product, with government-written requirements and cost-plus contracts. Anduril flips that script by owning the manufacturing chain. The analysis states it plainly:
The old primes bolt together parts from a dozen or more contractors, Anduril owns the lot, and owning the lot is exactly what keeps its cost down and its speed up, while the giants just can't help being fat and slow.
The Long Beach campus puts that philosophy into concrete and steel. The Site pairs offices with industrial research space, giving teams direct access to such on-site capabilities on site. Anduril’s campus description stresses that on-site machine shops let teams design, build, and test components without leaving, streamlining iteration.
For the engineers who fill those new jobs, the layout deletes the longest delay in hardware work: the handoff. The same proximity exists here: software and hardware staff work side by side, flight test teams collaborate with R&D specialists, and a machinist is steps from the drafting table. Legacy primes cannot easily copy it. Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop hold decades of experience and manufacturing scale, but their revenue rests on selling the box, not a system that improves after delivery. Outsourced supply chains force each design revision through layers of contractors. A traditional program absorbs that friction because cost-plus passes the bill to the Pentagon. Anduril spends its own money to build the product first, then sells the finished working system to the government.
The company backs the talk with vertical buys. It acquired an infrared camera maker to own its sensors, a rocket engine company for solid rocket motors, and a Dublin firm that builds field computers for its Lattice software. Last August it opened the first new solid rocket motor factory in the US in 50 years, becoming the country's third motor supplier. The Long Beach site extends the same logic to Southern California, letting teams design, test, and iterate across locations.
Proof sits in the Fury autonomous combat aircraft. Design work started, first flight came 556 days later, and it entered production in March 2026, months ahead of schedule. No prime silo hits that cadence by bolting external parts.
Anduril’s board shows the insourcing push continues with roles like Senior Product Sourcing Engineer and Head of Production, Rocket Motor Systems. Those posts exist to control supply rather than broker it.
Anduril isn't profitable across the company and told investors it won't be until around 2030, with a 2026 operating loss estimated near $1.2 billion while it builds new plants in Ohio and Mississippi and this California campus at once. The bet is that owning fabrication beats renting it. If the Long Beach machine shops compress space-flight-test hardware cycles the way Fury did for airframes, the primes will face a cost curve they can't match without breaking their own business model.
Should Defense-Software Engineers Join the Space Push?
Anduril’s hiring board fills with new roles daily as software engineers from tech giants weigh a move into integrated defense-space work, where code controls drones and orbital payloads rather than ad pipelines.
Defense-tech funding nearly doubled to $49 billion in 2025 (jobsbyculture.com), and CNBC reported that venture-backed firms like Anduril and SpaceX now act as “neoprimes,” reshaping a sector long ruled by legacy primes. Anduril’s space team builds a software layer for Space Domain Awareness and Command and Control, pulling computer-science talent toward hardware they can touch. The Long Beach campus, announced in January 2026 at 1.18 million square feet near the airport with a $1 billion project value estimated by the same chamber, puts those software people next to machine shops and flight-test teams. That setup is the lure.
Pay closes the debate for many. Anduril’s total compensation rivals late-stage startups, not defense primes, blending base, equity, and bonuses.
Engineers are leaving big tech for hefty pay premiums, and Anduril’s headcount reflects that shift. For a programmer at a large tech firm, a switch can mean doubling take-home while building systems that fly.
The integrated model changes the daily job. At Anduril, developers and hardware builders share the same floor, and flight-test crews collaborate directly with R&D specialists on site. A developer writing guidance code for a modular space payload can visit that same workstation where it gets mounted. That breaks the silo pattern of legacy primes, where software requests pass through layers of program management.
Culture filters the applicants. Paraform noted the company recruits believers rather than hiring engineers cold, and warned that the work is hard on hard problems.
Anduril doesn’t hire engineers. They recruit believers.
That hard-mode pitch repels some and attracts those bored by internal tooling at big tech. Siliconvalleytime wrote that his AI systems offer genuine advantages in speed, scale, and reduced risk to friendly forces, potentially life-saving in future conflicts. Software engineers evaluating the move see a chance to ship production code that directly affects kinetic outcomes.
Defense startups post 5.2 open roles per company versus 3.5 for pure software firms, a 50% gap Paraform measured. Anduril’s board listings show the density in practice. A developer weighing options in Southern California can pick between a FAANG cafeteria and a hangar where flight tests launch down the road.
The concrete next step for a backend engineer tired of ad ranking: Anduril’s space push needs people who can write C2 software for orbital threats. The Long Beach campus will open its machine shops to those who join, and the board refreshes daily.
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