Production Talent, Planning & Strategy Lead

About The Role

At Anduril, our ability to achieve ambitious goals is directly tied to our ability to plan for and attract the right talent. The TA Operations role for Talent Planning & Strategy is the embedded strategic operations partner to the Head of Talent for Production — owning the data, the capacity model, the demand narrative, and the prioritization framework so your leader can make decisions with confidence and the business always knows where we stand.

This is a high-impact, strategic role designed for a systems-thinker with a recruiting background who thrives on translating business ambiguity into a clear, actionable roadmap. While your roots are in talent acquisition, your primary focus will be on the "before the req" strategy — capacity planning, demand prioritization, and the executive narrative that connects hiring to business outcomes. You will not carry a req load, but your TA practitioner DNA is what gives you credibility with the recruiting team and the instinct to catch plans that won't survive contact with the market.

What You'll Do

Strategic Headcount, Capacity & Demand Planning 

• Own the Planning System for Production: Build, operate, and continuously improve the headcount planning and capacity modeling system for the Production TA function. This is not a shared service — you own it end-to-end for your Head of TA.
• Model Capacity Against Demand: Maintain a real-time view of recruiting capacity (OBd recruiters, ramp curves, hires/recruiter/month) vs. incoming demand. Surface gaps before they become crises. Frame trade-offs — not just "we're short" but "here are three options to close the gap: prioritize, improve efficiency, or add capacity."
• Drive Prioritization: Work with your Head of TA and Production/site leaders to prioritize hiring demand against constrained capacity. Build the data-backed narrative that explains WHY certain roles are sequenced before others (revenue impact, contract milestones, build-rate and ramp dependencies, single-point-of-failure).
• Build the Executive Narrative: Translate raw data into compelling stories for leadership. Your Head of TA should never walk into a QBR, MBR, or exec review without a capacity story you built — one that connects hiring progress to business outcomes, frames risks clearly, and proposes solutions rather than just surfacing problems.
• Standardize Demand Intake: Design and operate the framework for how business lines and sites in Production submit, justify, and prioritize hiring needs. Create a single source of truth from disparate requests.
• Govern the Plan: Serve as the steward of the master headcount plan for Production. Track approvals, model scenarios, manage change control, and ensure leadership always has a reliable, current view of where we stand.
• Align Cross-Functionally: Partner with Finance, Strategy, HR, and your peer planning partners (the other two in this team) to ensure Production's plan ladders into the enterprise view. Same methodology, same tools, same reporting cadence — but deep expertise in Production's dynamics.

TA Program Leadership 

• Lead Assigned TA Projects: Act as the TA subject-matter expert for projects that impact Production — process improvements, system enhancements, reporting maturity, or cross-functional initiatives.
• Drive Efficiency: Identify inefficiencies in the broader talent ecosystem for Production. Surface them with data, propose solutions, and lead implementation. Your Head of TA should view you as the person who makes the recruiting machine run better — not just measures it.
• Be the Connective Tissue: Because you see the full demand/capacity picture for Production, you are uniquely positioned to spot patterns — where pipeline is building faster than expected, where conversion rates suggest a systemic issue, where a process change could unlock capacity without adding headcount.

Who You Are

You are a strategic operator with recruiting DNA. You've been a great recruiter — you know what it feels like to manage a pipeline, miss a target start, close a hard candidate, and feel the weight of capacity constraints firsthand. But you've evolved beyond individual execution into systems thinking: how do you build the operational engine that makes 50 recruiters more effective without adding a 51st?

You find joy in creating order from chaos. You are equally comfortable building a multi-quarter forecast in a spreadsheet and telling a VP why their demand plan is infeasible at current capacity — and what to do about it. You are a master facilitator, skilled at leading rooms of strong-willed leaders to consensus. You see talent acquisition not as a series of transactions, but as a complex system that can be optimized for massive business impact.

Your Head of TA will come to rely on you the way a Division SVP relies on their DivOps leaders: you're the person who always knows the number, always has the context, and always has a recommendation — not just a report.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience with a foundation in talent acquisition (minimum 3 years as a practicing recruiter or recruiting leader) PLUS experience in planning, operations, strategy, or analytics.
• Proven experience building or significantly redesigning a planning, capacity, or demand management process — not just operating within one.
• Demonstrated mastery of data analysis and modeling: highly proficient in Excel/Google Sheets, capable of building headcount and capacity models from the ground up.
• Exceptional communication and narrative skills: can translate a spreadsheet into a 3-slide executive story that drives a decision. Not just "here's the data" but "here's what it means and what we should do."
• Experience driving prioritization decisions across competing stakeholders — not just collecting inputs, but shaping outcomes through data and influence.
• Deep understanding of the recruiting lifecycle, capacity math (hires/recruiter/month, ramp models, conversion rates), and labor market dynamics — enough to catch infeasible plans before they're committed.
• Ability to operate with high autonomy in an ambiguous, fast-paced environment. You will be building infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a BizOps, FP&A, or Strategy & Ops role (in addition to TA background) — the combination is the superpower.
• Direct experience building and managing a headcount planning or workforce planning process in a high-growth technology or manufacturing environment.
• Experience in management consulting with a focus on human capital, org design, or operational strategy.
• Familiarity with HRIS (Workday, ChartHop) and ATS (Greenhouse) — you'll be pulling data from these systems to build your models.
• Experience operating in a matrixed or divisional org structure where planning requires aligning multiple P&Ls with different incentives.
• Experience with the DivOps or BizOps embedded partner model — you've seen this operating rhythm and want to bring it to TA.