Anduril went from prototype to production line in under three years. Now it needs engineers who understand both deep-sea pressure and autonomy software
A 7,400sqm Facility Purpose-Built for XL-AUV Production
Anduril's Sydney facility opened on October 31, 2025, seven weeks after the Royal Australian Navy awarded the company a A$1.7 billion Program of Record for the Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle. The first production unit rolled off the line ahead of schedule and entered sea acceptance testing, with delivery to the Navy planned for January 2026. Contract award to production output in under two months — a timeline that signals a shift most defense manufacturing hasn't made yet: moving autonomous undersea hardware from prototyping into repeatable volume production.
XL-AUVs are not small objects. Ghost Shark operates at depths up to 6,000 meters and runs missions of up to ten days without intervention. Building something that size at volume demands more than a workshop. Anduril's Sydney site includes automated manufacturing, AI-driven logistics, gantry tracking, and an in-water test tank adjacent to the production line so buoyancy, electrical, and safety checks happen metres from where workers assembled the vehicle. The plant produces both the Ghost Shark XL-AUV and the commercial Dive-XL baseline on the same line, with full-rate production targeted for 2026.
More than 40 Australian small and medium enterprises supply components and sub-systems. That supply chain turns a one-off prototype program into something a fleet can rely on, since acquisition depends on repeatable supplier quality rather than bespoke engineering. The Australian government framed the factory opening as a sovereign-industrial milestone, and the Minister for Defence Industry, Pat Conroy, called Ghost Shark "the most high-tech long range autonomous underwater capability that exists in the world today."
Autonomous-undersea manufacturing has crossed a threshold. Most naval robotics programs remain in low-volume, semi-custom production. Anduril built a purpose-sized facility, stood up a supplier network, and produced a vehicle in the same quarter it won the contract. Whether that pace holds through full-rate production is the next question. The answer depends on the workforce Anduril hires to run the line.
The AU$1.7B Contract as Workforce Anchor
The Australian Government signed the five-year contract with Anduril Australia in September 2025 for delivery, maintenance, and continued development of the Ghost Shark. That single procurement line is the economic engine behind the Sydney factory. Without it, the facility has no reason to exist at that scale.
Anduril originally signed a co-development agreement with the Royal Australian Navy and the Defence Science and Technology Group in May 2022 to produce three prototype XL-AUVs over three years. The shift from prototype program to formal Program of Record is what converts a research effort into a manufacturing workforce demand. Low-rate initial production begins immediately, with high-rate production targeted by 2026, Naval News reported.
The five-year contract supports roughly 120 existing roles and creates more than 150 new long-term positions at Anduril Australia. The Defence Ministry estimates the supply chain adds a further 600 jobs across those 40-plus companies as production scales. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles called it "a world-leading platform made right here in Australia."
The contract's structure makes it a workforce anchor rather than a one-off spike. It covers maintenance and continued development across the five-year window, which means engineering roles must persist through the production cycle, not just during initial build. The 2024 National Defence Strategy explicitly names uncrewed undersea and surface vessels as an asymmetric capability priority, giving the program a strategic policy tailwind that extends beyond a single budget cycle.
What XL-AUV Production Demands From Talent
Building an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle that dives to 6,000 meters and operates without a crew for up to ten days is not a job for generalist engineers. The Ghost Shark program requires a specific mix of deep-domain hardware and software talent that most defense contractors outside the U.S. would struggle to recruit at all, let alone in volume.
The vehicle itself, Anduril's Dive-XL platform, is a modular XL-AUV designed for intelligence, surveillance, and strike missions. Its core autonomy stack runs on Anduril's Lattice for Mission Autonomy system, which handles real-time decision-making and coordinates swarm operations with other unmanned platforms. The Sydney factory needs engineers who can build, integrate, and test both the physical vessel and the software that lets it function without a human at the controls.
The most visible hiring signal is the Field Operations Engineer role for autonomous underwater vehicles. This position sits at the boundary between engineering and operations, deploying AUVs in the field, running demonstrations and exercises, sustaining hardware in operational environments, and feeding lessons back to the engineering team. It is not a desk job. It requires someone comfortable on a test vessel, able to troubleshoot buoyancy and electrical systems in Anduril's in-water test tank, and capable of translating field failures into design changes.
On the software side, Anduril's open roles in Sydney include reliability engineering at multiple seniority levels, with compensation ranging from roughly AU$126,000 for mid-level roles to AU$218,000-plus for senior and staff positions. The emphasis on site reliability signals that the company is building production-grade infrastructure, not one-off prototypes. When you shift from building three test vehicles to building a fleet, the failure modes change. Software that worked in a controlled demo environment has to survive saltwater, pressure cycles, and months of autonomous operation without a restart.
The production floor adds another layer. The Sydney facility uses advanced robotics and AI-managed logistics to support high-volume manufacturing. That means the workforce includes manufacturing engineers familiar with composites, pressure vessel fabrication, and marine-grade electrical systems, skills that overlap with shipbuilding but require the higher tolerances and integration complexity of autonomous systems. The facility also supports the commercial Dive-XL variant, so engineers build to both defense and civilian certification standards.
What makes this hiring profile unusual is the combination. You need people who understand deep-sea pressure and autonomy software, who can work with both the 40-plus Australian SMEs supplying components and the proprietary Lattice system, and who can operate at the pace of a program that went from prototype to production line in under three years. The first Ghost Shark did so ahead of schedule and is already in in-water testing ahead of a planned delivery in January 2026. That timeline does not tolerate long learning curves.
For engineers weighing the opportunity, the signal is clear: Anduril is not hiring for a single prototype program. It is building a production workforce for a platform that the Australian Navy expects to operate for years and that allied buyers (potentially including the U.S., U.K., Japan, Singapore, and South Korea) may acquire under export approval. The roles are specific, the domain is narrow, and the demand is sustained by a contract that runs through the end of the decade.
AUKUS and Pacific Defense-Tech Spillover
The Ghost Shark factory opened in Sydney just seven weeks after the program-of-record announcement. Anduril's facility sits inside AUKUS Pillar 2, the advanced-technology cooperation stream covering autonomous systems, AI, electronic warfare, and undersea capabilities. The U.S. Navy ordered its own Ghost Shark prototype alongside the Royal Australian Navy's three, and a prototype was flown to Hawaii on a RAAF C-17 for trials during Exercise RIMPAC in mid-2024. That makes the Sydney factory a production site for two AUKUS navies from day one.
Pillar 1's submarine cooperation has already pulled Australian contractors into Virginia-class supply chains, and Honeywell received the first U.S. Navy contract specifically aimed at integrating Australian businesses into nuclear-submarine production. Pillar 2, where Ghost Shark lives, is structured to share technology, co-develop capabilities, and distribute production across allied nations rather than concentrating it in U.S. facilities. Anduril's Sydney site, purpose-built for XL-AUV serial production with robotic tooling and a sovereign supply chain of more than 40 Australian companies, is the first physical proof that Pillar 2's autonomous-systems goals translate into hardware and headcount outside American borders.
Whether this becomes a template depends on two things. First, the Ghost Shark production schedule: Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said the platform delivers ISR and strike capability within five years, and Naval News reported the program moves into high-rate production by 2026. Second, export demand. The Australian Department of Defence explicitly framed Ghost Shark as having "strong prospects for export opportunities," and the factory's footprint suggests Anduril built more capacity than the RAN's "dozens" of vehicles alone would require. If a second AUKUS partner or a Pacific-aligned navy places a follow-on order, Sydney becomes the default production node, serving the same function as Anduril's Costa Mesa facility does as the U.S. hub for multiple programs.
The spillover is already measurable in jobs. Zero G Talent's board lists 156 Anduril roles added in the past week alone, including reliability engineering positions in Sydney. That's not a one-off hiring spike; it's the workforce ramp of a production program designed to run for years and serve multiple navies.
The open question is whether allied governments treat distributed manufacturing as policy or as a one-off. AUKUS Pillar 2 has no binding production-sharing agreement equivalent to the nuclear-submarine arrangement in Pillar 1. If the Ghost Shark program delivers on time and the Sydney factory fills its bays with vehicles bound for more than one flag, it becomes the precedent other allied-nation builds will be measured against. If it stays a single-customer line, it's a capable but isolated facility. The next 18 months of production data will answer that.
Sydney in the Context of Anduril's Distributed Defense-Tech Workforce
Sydney isn't an outlier. It's a node.
Anduril's XL-AUV production facility sits inside a company that has spent the last 18 months assembling a genuinely distributed manufacturing and engineering footprint, one that now stretches from a purpose-built plant in Ohio to a planned $1-billion campus in Long Beach, California, to advanced talks to establish a defense-tech hub in Israel. The through-line: Anduril builds where its customers are, hires where the talent is, and keeps production close to the sovereign procurement contracts that pay for it.
The U.S. base remains the backbone. Anduril's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, anchors a Southern California operation that the company plans to expand with a 1.1-million-square-foot Long Beach and Lakewood campus. In Ohio, the Arsenal-1 facility (a purpose-built manufacturing plant that broke ground in early 2025) is designed to scale drone and interceptor production at volumes no single Anduril site has hit before. The company's headcount sits at roughly 7,000, up from 90 in 2019, and its latest funding round valued it at $61 billion on $2.2 billion in 2025 revenue.
But the international moves signal a structural shift. In November 2025, Anduril and UAE-based EDGE Group launched a joint venture called Omen to manufacture tail-sitting VTOL drones with hybrid-electric propulsion, with a dedicated production facility in the UAE. In Ireland, Anduril acquired a small edge-computing and tactical-communications startup, which remains its only non-U.S. acquisition of meaningful scale until now. And in June 2026, multiple Israeli financial outlets reported that Anduril was in final-stage talks to appoint a local operations manager, establish an Israeli R&D and sales operation, and begin evaluating acquisition targets among Israeli defense-tech startups including LiteVision, ASIO, and several firms presented by DDR&D during Palmer Luckey's February visit.
The pattern is consistent: Anduril enters a market cautiously, tests through partnerships or joint ventures, then commits physical infrastructure once demand is locked. Sydney followed the same logic. The Ghost Shark contract gave Anduril a sovereign demand signal large enough to justify a purpose-built facility. The Israel talks appear to be following an analogous path, starting with local defence ministry relationships and deferring production decisions.
What makes this hiring story different from a standard defense-contractor expansion is the distribution of engineering work itself. Anduril's open roles on Zero G Talent's board right now include reliability engineering positions in Sydney, Costa Mesa, Quincy, Massachusetts, and Atlanta, a spread that mirrors the company's physical footprint rather than concentrating talent in a single hub. The Sydney facility isn't assembling components designed in California. It's manufacturing full XL-AUV platforms, which means the local workforce owns production engineering, integration, and test, not just final assembly.
A distributed-manufacturing model creates demand for the same hard-to-find skill sets (autonomy, sensor fusion, edge AI, marine systems integration) in every geography where Anduril plants a factory. The company isn't searching for one regional labor pool. It's building several, in parallel, each anchored to a specific sovereign contract and each requiring engineers who can work on production-grade autonomous hardware, not prototypes.
The open question is whether the Israel operation follows the Sydney template, with a production facility tied to local procurement, or stays in R&D-and-sales mode longer. The UAE joint venture suggests Anduril prefers shared-risk entry in new markets. The Israel talks, by contrast, point toward a more direct model: local hires, local acquisitions, local ministry relationships, with Luckey's personal involvement signaling strategic priority.
For engineers weighing where defense-tech hiring is heading, the signal is clear: Anduril is building a company where the factories follow the contracts, the contracts follow the allies, and the jobs follow the factories. Sydney is the Pacific proof point. Ohio is the U.S. industrial base. Israel, if it materializes, would be the next node in a network that treats sovereign defense demand as the workforce planning input, not the output.
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