Senior Firmware Engineer, Sentry Tower

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 Team

The Sentry Tower Software team is responsible for developing robotic systems that provide force protection capabilities, monitoring the perimeter of secure areas, land or sea, for approaching people, vehicles, and vessels. We live in a world where security officers are increasingly overwhelmed by sensor data feeds. Our products leverage advanced sensor fusion and autonomy to seamlessly render activity in the environment to Lattice’s common operating picture.

About the Job

We are looking for a Software Engineer with a focus in Firmware to join our rapidly growing team in Irvine. In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining software for current and next-generation Sentry Tower systems. This will include interacting with stakeholders like Anduril’s business lines of Air Defense and Counter Intrusion all the way from internal engineering customers to the people in the field, prioritizing what matters to them in the long run.

Firmware is the layer with the least margin for error in the product. It runs on the sensor boards and motor controllers that make a tower move and sense, on hardware that sits outdoors for months without a service visit, and it is the part hardest to fix once a unit is fielded. A bug in a service can be patched in an update; a bug in firmware can mean a tower that has to be reached in person.

The honest version: you are joining an existing firmware platform, not starting one. There is a working baselayer that our towers already run on, and the work is the specialized projects that sit on top of it or replace parts of it, which means reading and understanding code you did not write before you are allowed to be confident about changing it. That is slower and less glamorous than a clean sheet, and it is the actual job. The feedback loop is also slower than in application software, and the discipline the role rewards is caution: getting it right before it ships, because the cost of being wrong is measured in trips to a site rather than in a redeploy.

Our Product: https://www.anduril.com/hardware/sentry/

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Develop and extend the firmware running on the sensor boards, motor controllers, and power and monitoring hardware inside our Sentry Tower products.
• Take on the projects that build on top of our existing firmware baselayer, and the ones that replace parts of it, without regressing the towers already depending on it.
• Drive our ongoing effort to harden firmware security: authenticated and verified firmware updates, protecting the interfaces a physical attacker could reach, and closing the gaps in what shipped before that was a requirement.
• Own the firmware update path, including updates that have to be safe to apply to a unit already in the field.
• Work with our tower software team on the boundary between firmware and the services above it, so a failure can be diagnosed from either side.
• Collaborate with hardware engineers on board bring-up and debugging, from first power-on to a validated, production-ready board.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 4+ years experience in firmware development using C, with Rust experience or demonstrated interest in memory-safe firmware.
• Strong understanding of microcontroller architectures (ARM, RISC-V).
• Hands-on experience with embedded security: secure boot, signed/verified firmware updates, key storage, or hardware root of trust.
• Proficiency in low-level networking protocols (TCP/IP, CAN, SPI, I2C).
• Experience with RTOS and bare-metal programming.
• Familiarity with debugging tools like JTAG, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers.
• Solid understanding of computer architecture and memory management.
• US person status required, with eligibility to obtain and maintain a US security clearance.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with kernel development or device driver implementation.
• Embedded Rust in production (embassy, RTIC, or no_std bare-metal).
• Threat modeling, fault injection / side-channel awareness, or firmware reverse engineering and vulnerability research.
• Familiarity with DMA, interrupt handling, and power management.
• Experience with version control systems (Git) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Background in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.

US Salary Range

$182,000—$292,000 USD

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.

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