Anduril's Long Beach campus to add 5,500 jobs near naval and aerospace suppliers

In March 2026, months ahead of its original July target, Anduril Industries started production at Arsenal-1 — a 500-acre autonomous weapons factory in Pickaway County, Ohio, that will eventually span 5 million square feet and employ over 4,000 workers. On the same timeline, the Costa Mesa-based defense-tech company broke ground on a $1 billion, 1.18-million-square-foot campus in Long Beach, California, with its first building set to open by late 2027. These aren't isolated construction projects. They're the twin anchors of a deliberate strategy to build defense-tech careers where engineers already live — not where the industry has traditionally demanded they move.

Anduril is executing a multi-state hiring blitz that rewrites the recruitment playbook for defense technology. Instead of clustering near Washington, DC, or Silicon Valley, the company is embedding manufacturing and R&D near military test ranges and legacy aerospace hubs — Ohio's Rickenbacker logistics corridor and Southern California's "Space Beach." With median engineer pay exceeding $237,000, active clearance sponsorship, and roles open to candidates from automotive and electronics backgrounds, Anduril is creating credible, high-paying career paths for engineers who never planned to move to Northern Virginia or Palo Alto. This isn't just expansion. It's a structural shift in defense labor geography — and it's already ahead of schedule.

Arsenal-1: Ohio's Largest Job-Creation Project Is Already Running Four Months Early

Anduril's Ohio bet isn't speculative. It's operational and accelerating. When the company announced Arsenal-1 on January 16, 2025, the plan was to begin production by mid-2026. Instead, the facility started producing drones and autonomous air vehicles in March 2026 — four months early — with roughly 250 workers on the floor at a site that will scale to 4,008 direct employees by 2035.

The campus sits on 500 acres near Rickenbacker International Airport, about 16 miles southeast of Columbus. The full build-out will span seven buildings totaling 5 million square feet. Building 1 alone comprises 775,000 square feet of production space and 120,000 square feet of office and support space. Anduril committed at least $910.5 million in capital investment and more than $530 million in new payroll over 10 years to secure the deal. Ohio responded with a $310 million grant through JobsOhio under a 30-year economic development agreement, plus $70 million from the All Ohio Future Fund and a Job Creation Tax Credit.

The economic projections are equally large: an estimated 4,500 indirect and induced jobs over 10 years and over $2 billion in annual economic output once the facility reaches full operation, per the Ohio Department of Development. That makes Arsenal-1 the largest single job-creation project in Ohio history — a state that ranks third nationally in manufacturing employment, according to JobsOhio.

The product lines rolling off the line include the YFQ-44A Fury combat drone, the Roadrunner interceptor drone, and the Barracuda cruise missile family. The Fury completed its first flight on October 31, 2025 — just 365 days after clean-sheet design, according to Ohio Tech News. That speed isn't accidental. It's the direct result of a manufacturing philosophy that treats commercial off-the-shelf components and modular software as first principles, not afterthoughts.

How Anduril Turns Regional Workforce Strengths into Defense-Tech Advantage

Roughly 90% of the components in Anduril's products are commercially available — pulled from existing automotive, aerospace, and electronics supply chains rather than custom-fabricated in classified facilities, according to Ohio Tech News. Combined with Lattice OS, the company's AI-powered command-and-control platform, this approach enables modular, software-defined manufacturing across multiple product lines on the same assembly line.

The practical effect is significant: Anduril can hire from Ohio's deep manufacturing workforce — automotive technicians, embedded-systems engineers, electronics assemblers — rather than relying exclusively on cleared defense veterans. Engineers with manufacturing or embedded-systems experience can transition into defense work without prior security clearance or domain-specific expertise. The company sponsors U.S. Secret clearance for many positions, removing what has traditionally been one of the largest barriers to entry in defense contracting.

Anduril has also moved to secure the long-term talent pipeline. The company partners with local school districts, community colleges, and universities in the Pickaway County and greater Columbus areas to build a steady stream of qualified candidates, per Ohio Tech News. These partnerships aren't press-release formalities — they're operational necessities for a facility that needs to scale from 250 workers to over 4,000 within a decade.

This model isn't limited to Ohio. Anduril is replicating the same approach in Southern California, where a second major hub is taking shape with different but complementary capabilities.

Long Beach: A Shipyard-Adjacent R&D Hub

On January 22, 2026, Anduril announced a $1 billion investment for a new campus in Long Beach and Lakewood, California. The Long Beach site alone will total 1.18 million square feet across six buildings — 750,000 square feet of office space and 435,000 square feet of industrial R&D space. Construction is set to begin mid-2026, with the first building expected to open by the end of 2027. The campus will support approximately 5,500 direct jobs, per the Los Angeles Times.

The location is strategic. The Long Beach site sits at Douglas Park, near Long Beach Airport, in a corridor that Mayor Rex Richardson has branded "Space Beach" — already home to Rocket Lab, Vast, and a cluster of aerospace firms that have migrated south from traditional hubs. Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to the expansion as evidence of California's continued leadership in aerospace and defense innovation.

Proximity matters here in ways that don't apply to Ohio. The Long Beach campus sits near the Port of Long Beach, Naval Base San Diego, and a dense network of legacy aerospace suppliers. That adjacency enables rapid prototyping, at-sea testing coordination, and direct collaboration with naval operators — capabilities that are harder to replicate inland.

Together, Ohio and California form a dual-engine strategy. Arsenal-1 handles high-volume manufacturing at scale. Long Beach focuses on R&D, software development, and integration with naval and aerospace operations. The two campuses aren't competing — they're complementary halves of a single company that now employs about 7,000 people across 35 global locations, with roughly half based in Southern California, per the Los Angeles Times.

Big-Tech Pay and Sponsored Clearances Remove Two Traditional Barriers

Compensation is where Anduril's recruitment pitch gets concrete. The company's median total compensation is $237,475, according to Levels.fyi data updated June 10, 2026. Software engineers at the L7 level earn up to $517,000. Aerospace engineers sit at a median of $263,000. Those figures compete directly with FAANG-level pay — and they're available in Ohio and Long Beach, not just the Bay Area.

The picture varies by source. Glassdoor reports an average engineer salary of $126,220, while Salary.com lists the average annual salary at $91,703 as of May 2026. The discrepancy reflects the breadth of roles included in those averages — administrative, support, and early-career positions alongside senior technical staff. For experienced engineers on technical tracks, the Levels.fyi data is the more relevant benchmark.

The clearance question is equally important. Many positions require U.S. Secret security clearance due to federal contracting requirements, but Anduril actively sponsors candidates through the process. That's a meaningful departure from the legacy defense model, where applicants typically need clearance in hand before applying — a catch-22 that locks out anyone without prior military or government experience.

Contrast this with the traditional defense corridor. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Booz Allen Hamilton have long concentrated their workforces around Washington, DC, requiring engineers to relocate to Northern Virginia or Maryland. Anduril's distributed model means a software developer in Long Beach or a mechanical engineer in Columbus can enter cleared defense work without uprooting their lives.

The $14B War Chest Behind the Dual-Campus Gambit

Anduril's expansion is backed by serious capital, not hype. The company reached a $14 billion valuation in 2024 on reported revenue of $500 million that same year, per TechCrunch. It subsequently raised $1.5 billion in a funding round explicitly earmarked for hyperscaling defense manufacturing — capital that supports both the Ohio and California expansions simultaneously.

The leadership team reads like a roster of defense-tech veterans. Co-founders Brian Schimpf (CEO) and Matt Grimm (COO) are former Palantir engineers. Palmer Luckey, the third co-founder, previously built Oculus VR before selling it to Facebook. Christian Brose serves as chief strategy officer. Shane Arnott, senior vice president of programs and engineering, and Tom Keane, a senior vice president and former Microsoft executive, round out the executive bench. Executive compensation disclosures filed under FFATA show top earners include Schimpf ($19.2 million in 2021), Grimm ($13.8 million in 2021), and Luckey ($10.9 million in 2021), though those figures include multiyear equity grants, per TechCrunch.

State incentives reinforce the financial picture. Ohio's 30-year deal, the $70 million from the All Ohio Future Fund, and the Job Creation Tax Credit all signal that state governments view Anduril as a long-term economic anchor, not a speculative bet. JobsOhio, One Columbus, Pickaway County, and the Ohio Department of Development are all listed as local partners.

A Quiet Revolution in Defense Labor Mobility

The deeper shift here isn't about any single factory or campus. It's about where defense-tech work happens. For decades, the industry clustered around political power (Washington, DC) and venture capital (Silicon Valley). Anduril is placing major facilities near military infrastructure — Rickenbacker's logistics hub in Ohio, Long Beach's naval and aerospace adjacency — and letting the talent follow the work, rather than the other way around.

The company's own workforce distribution reflects this philosophy. With roughly half of its 7,000 employees based in Southern California and operations across 35 global locations, Anduril has built a distributed workforce that doesn't depend on a single talent pool. Active job postings — including roles like Product Sourcing Engineer in Ashville, Ohio, and People Team Site Lead at Arsenal-1 — confirm that hiring is operational, not aspirational.

This decentralization carries national security implications. Concentrating critical defense manufacturing in a handful of corridors creates single points of failure. By building production capacity in Ohio and R&D infrastructure in Southern California, Anduril is helping to distribute the industrial base that the Department of Defense depends on — a priority that has gained urgency after years of supply-chain fragility exposed during the pandemic.

Two years ago, a mechanical engineer in Columbus or a software developer in Long Beach faced a binary choice: stay put or chase defense work in Virginia. Today, Anduril is building the factories — and the career ladders — right where they already live.

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