Anduril→
CW Production Lead at Anduril in Costa Mesa, CA
Job Description
Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century’s most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting-edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.
About The Role
As a Production Recruiting Lead for Connected Warfare (CW) Division, you are the single-threaded owner of all production/manufacturing/supply chain hiring outcomes. This role exists to solve a critical alignment gap: giving CW leaders direct visibility, accountability, and control over their talent pipelines while maintaining leverage from centralized recruiting operations.
You will operate as an embedded player-coach and strategic program manager—personally executing our most critical and complex production assignments while aligning the priorities and workload of the centralized production recruiting team for all of your divisional roles. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role designed for a proven recruiting operator who can think strategically, execute tactically, and build trusted relationships with senior divisional leadership.
This role is a deliberate bridge in our organizational evolution: it creates the foundation for CW to eventually roll-up production recruiting end-to-end while maintaining execution efficiency and central coordination during a period of structural maturity.
What You'll Do
Divisional Accountability & Strategic Ownership
- Own end-to-end production hiring outcomes for CW, including headcount planning, demand forecasting, requisition prioritization, and delivery against hiring targets.
- Act as the primary strategic talent partner to your Head of TA and senior divisional leaders, translating business objectives into executable hiring strategies.
- Deliver regular reporting on hiring health, pipeline velocity, capacity constraints, and risk mitigation to divisional leadership—providing full transparency and "positive control" over talent delivery.
- Define and manage SLAs, hiring goals, and success metrics for your Division's production portfolio in partnership with business stakeholders.
Hands-On Recruiting Execution (Player)
- Personally own and execute full-cycle recruiting on priority roles as needed for CW's most critical, complex, or strategic production roles, including:
- Leadership and senior technical hires (Head of, Director, VPs)
- Single-point-of-failure roles or positions with unique market challenges
- First-of-their-kind roles requiring deep business context and creative sourcing strategies
- Set the standard for recruiting excellence within your Division—demonstrating best-in-class sourcing, candidate engagement, assessment rigor, and offer negotiation.
- Maintain credibility and market intelligence by staying hands-on in the craft of recruiting, ensuring you deeply understand talent availability, compensation trends, and competitive dynamics.
Program Management & Priority Direction (Coach)
- Align the day-to-day priorities of the centralized production recruiting team aligned to your Division, ensuring their focus is calibrated to the highest-impact hiring needs.
- Provide coaching, real-time feedback, and quality assurance to centralized recruiters working on your Division's roles (without formal people management responsibility).
- Lead the operational rhythm for your Division's production hiring portfolio, including intake meetings, pipeline reviews, and cross-functional coordination with hiring managers, HR, and Finance.
- Act as the single escalation point for hiring blockers, process breakdowns, or stakeholder misalignment within your Division.
- Design and lead surge hiring initiatives, high-volume campaigns, or other complex hiring programs specific to your Division's business needs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence
- Partner closely with The Lead Coordinator, for Overall Divisional Production TA to ensure process consistency, share best practices, and contribute to cross-divisional reporting and strategic planning.
- Provide structured input into performance evaluations and development plans for centralized recruiters supporting your Division, ensuring their contributions to divisional outcomes are recognized.
- Build strong relationships with Divisional BizOps, Finance, and Workforce Planning teams to align on headcount allocation, budget, and hiring sequencing.
- Influence hiring manager behavior and decision-making, serving as a trusted advisor on candidate quality, market realities, and talent strategy trade-offs.
Who You Are
You are a high-performing recruiting operator who thrives in ambiguity and enjoys owning outcomes. You are equally comfortable rolling up your sleeves to close a Director-level hire and stepping back to orchestrate a 50+ role hiring sprint. You have the business acumen to partner with senior leaders, the program management discipline to drive complex initiatives, and the recruiting chops to execute at the highest level.
You see this role as what it is: a strategic springboard—a chance to prove you can own a business-critical function, build scalable systems, and lead through influence before stepping into formal people leadership.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of talent acquisition experience, including significant recent experience as a full-cycle production or technical recruiter in a fast-paced, high-volume environment.
- Proven ability to operate independently with minimal oversight, managing complex hiring portfolios, competing priorities, and ambiguous situations with sound judgment.
- Strong business partnership skills: experience influencing and advising Director-level and above stakeholders, translating business needs into hiring strategies, and managing escalations diplomatically.
- Demonstrated program management capability—experience leading hiring initiatives beyond individual requisitions, coordinating cross-functional teams, and delivering results through others.
- Excellent analytical and communication skills: ability to use data to drive decisions, tell a compelling story, and present hiring health narratives to senior leadership.
- Comfortable working in a matrixed environment, providing direction and feedback to peers without formal management authority.
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience recruiting for production, production operations, or frontline roles in industries such as synergistics, robotics, logistics, manufacturing, field services, or government contracting.
- Experience working in a decentralized or divisional business structure, particularly in organizations undergoing TA operating model transitions.
- Formal program or project management training or certification (e.g., PMP, Agile, Six Sigma).
- Prior experience as a recruiting lead, squad lead, or business partner with responsibility for a portfolio of hiring beyond personal requisition load.
- Familiarity with workforce planning, capacity modeling, and demand forecasting in partnership with Finance or BizOps teams.
- Track record of mentoring or coaching recruiters, with examples of improving team performance or developing junior talent.
Why This Role Matters
This is not a typical recruiting role. You are being entrusted with divisional accountability for a critical talent function during a pivotal moment in the organization's evolution. You will have direct influence over your Division's ability to meet contract milestones, scale operations, and hit revenue targets. Success in this role positions you as a proven internal candidate to lead a fully embedded or expanded Production TA organization in the future—and equips you with the strategic leadership experience needed to advance into senior TA leadership roles across the enterprise. You will be the bridge between strategy and execution. Between central leverage and divisional ownership. Between what we do today and what we build tomorrow.
The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. 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. For more information, Explore Our Benefits.
Protecting Yourself from Recruitment Scams
Anduril is committed to maintaining the integrity of our Talent acquisition process and the security of our candidates. We've observed a rise in sophisticated phishing and fraudulent schemes where individuals impersonate Anduril representatives, luring job seekers with false interviews or job offers. These scammers often attempt to extract payment or sensitive personal information.
To ensure your safety and help you navigate your job search with confidence, please keep the following critical points in mind:
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No Financial Requests: Anduril will never solicit payment or demand personal financial details (such as banking information, credit card numbers, or social security numbers) at any stage of our hiring process. Our legitimate recruitment is entirely free for candidates.
- Please always verify communications:
- Direct from Anduril: If you receive an email from one of our recruiters, it will only come from an
@anduril.comaddress. - Via Agency Partner: If contacted by a recruiting agency for an Anduril role, their email will clearly identify their agency. If you suspect any suspicious activity, please verify the agency's authenticity by reaching out to contact@anduril.com.
- Direct from Anduril: If you receive an email from one of our recruiters, it will only come from an
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Exercise Caution with Unsolicited Outreach: If you receive any communication that appears suspicious, contains grammatical errors, or makes unusual requests, do not engage. Always confirm the sender's email domain is @anduril.com before providing any personal information or clicking on links.
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What to Do If You Suspect Fraud: Should you encounter any questionable or fraudulent outreach claiming to be from Anduril, please report it immediately to contact@anduril.com. Your proactive caution is invaluable in protecting your personal information and upholding the security and trustworthiness of our recruitment efforts.
Data Privacy
To view Anduril's candidate data privacy policy, please visit https://anduril.com/applicant-privacy-notice/.
By submitting your application, you consent to Anduril Industries using a third-party service provider to conduct pre-employment risk, integrity, and due diligence screening and assessing potential risks as part of your application process. This third-party service provider provides risk-intelligence services that may include analysis of sanctions and watchlists, adverse media, public-record information, and other lawful open-source or commercial data sources. This third-party service provider does not act as a consumer reporting agency. Use of this provider helps to ensure compliance with applicable laws and protect technology, intellectual property, and organizational security.