Staff Materials Engineer, Design Allowables & Materials Data

Anduril • Costa Mesa, CA

3d

About The Position

Anduril's Materials Engineering team is seeking a Senior Materials and Process Engineer with a background in structural composites and bonded structures to join our rapidly growing team. Our team is the materials authority across Anduril's product portfolio, from autonomous aircraft and submarines to missiles and solid rocket motors, providing material selection guidance, developing design allowables, and qualifying manufacturing processes that take composite hardware from prototype to high-rate production. Anduril designs and fields systems across an unusually broad materials portfolio. Advancing our products depends on trusted, analysis-ready design allowables across this full range of materials, and this role owns how we generate, govern, and scale that material property data company-wide. This role is your opportunity to establish the methodology, infrastructure, and governance that turns materials characterization and material qualification into a strategically defined workflow for producing defensible, analysis-ready allowables. It’s your opportunity to set a technical standard and get an organization to adopt it. Shape how materials engineering gets done, not just what gets tested. You’ll build the foundation and scale it.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science, Materials Engineering, Metallurgy or a related field
• 8+ years of materials and process engineering experience in aerospace, defense, or a comparably rigorous domain
• Deep expertise in materials characterization and design allowables development, including statistical basis (e.g., MMPDS / CMH-17-style methods)
• Demonstrated experience turning test data into governed, analysis-ready datasets—data structure, statistics, and traceability (materials data management)
• Experience with material qualification and characterization: mechanical testing, and translating results into usable design values
• Proven ability to set a technical standard and drive adoption across teams
• Strong technical writing—your methodology and specifications are clear, unambiguous, and actionable
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and drive progress independently in a fast-paced environment
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Top Secret security clearance

Nice To Haves

• Active U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance
• Hands-on experience with scoping and executing a characterization campaign from scratch
• Background in fatigue and fracture mechanics, especially for fracture-critical or damage-tolerant components
• Experience with materials data management / materials informatics platforms and partnering with software/data teams to build data pipelines
• Direct experience with advanced or non-standard materials—high-temperature alloys, advanced composites, or additively-manufactured materials
• Experience integrating or standardizing materials data across disparate or legacy sources

Responsibilities

• Own the Design Allowables Standard. Define and own how test data becomes a defensible design value across Anduril’s business lines—statistical basis (A-basis / B-basis, pooling, reduction methods), acceptance and inclusion criteria, traceability, versioning, and controlled release. Your methodology becomes the baseline every program’s materials data is held to.
• Build the Materials Data Pipeline. Architect and stand up a materials data pipeline that ingests, structures, governs, and releases materials data into our enterprise materials database. Establish the criteria and pipeline that let advanced and non-standard materials be characterized once, correctly, and reused across programs.
• Turn Testing into a Strategic Workflow. Transform materials characterization and test data management from testing performed as needed into a defined system: what gets tested, to what rigor, and how results become trusted allowables.
• Establish Fatigue and Fracture-Critical Methodology. Define and implement a standardized approach to fatigue-life assessment and damage tolerance, including the qualification path for using materials in a fracture-critical applications, so high-consequence design decisions rest on a consistent, defensible basis.
• Extract Value from Lifecycle Material Data. Build the means to turn the material property and certification data generated across our supply chain into a growing statistical foundation that strengthens our knowledge base over time. Supplier, process and lot-to-lot variability, becomes a queryable digital thread of material traceability, and enables faster decision making through quantified material and process metrics.
• Serve as the Cross-Business-Line Technical Authority. Be the subject-matter expert for materials allowables and data across the portfolio. Partner with design, analysis, test, and quality to align on data requirements, support design and qualification reviews, and drive adoption of the right sized solution for a program.
• Seed the Function. Set the technical standard for materials data and allowables at Anduril. Build the capability and with it, the team around you. A staff engineer here builds capability in the people and systems around them, not just in the work they touch.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Anduril's total compensation package.
• Additionally, Anduril offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including: Benefits At Anduril, we invest in our people. Our comprehensive, competitive benefits package (available at little to no cost to employees) ensures you’re supported in health, recovery, and whatever comes next.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior