What is a Research Scientist at Anduril Industries?

As a Research Scientist at Anduril Industries, you are at the forefront of redefining defense technology through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous systems. This is not a traditional academic or siloed research role. At Anduril, research is inherently applied, fast-paced, and deeply integrated into the immediate needs of operators in the field. You will be tasked with solving some of the most complex, high-stakes problems in computer vision, sensor fusion, autonomous navigation, and distributed multi-agent systems.

The impact of this position is massive. Your work directly powers Lattice, Anduril’s AI-driven operating system, as well as a growing portfolio of hardware platforms like the Ghost Shark, Roadrunner, and Sentry Tower. The algorithms you design and optimize will dictate how autonomous systems perceive their environments, make split-second decisions at the tactical edge, and collaborate in contested environments. Because Anduril operates at the intersection of software and physical hardware, your research will frequently transition from simulation to real-world deployment on an accelerated timeline.

To succeed here, you must thrive in an environment of high ambiguity and scale. The problems you will face are computationally constrained, dynamic, and critical to national security. This role requires a unique blend of deep theoretical knowledge and a hacker’s mindset—you must be just as comfortable reading the latest academic papers on reinforcement learning as you are optimizing C++ code to run on edge compute hardware.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for an interview at Anduril requires a strategic approach that balances deep technical review with a clear articulation of your alignment with the company's defense mission.

Here are the key evaluation criteria your interviewers will be assessing:

• Domain Expertise – You will be evaluated on your deep understanding of machine learning, computer vision, or robotics. Interviewers want to see that you understand the mathematical foundations of your domain, not just how to call APIs from popular frameworks.
• Applied Problem-Solving – Anduril values builders. You must demonstrate how you translate theoretical research into deployable, optimized solutions that work in real-time, compute-constrained environments.
• Resilience and Defensibility – Interviewers will push back on your assumptions and technical choices. You are expected to confidently defend your methodologies, adapt to new constraints on the fly, and communicate your reasoning clearly under pressure.
• Mission Alignment – You must exhibit a genuine drive to work in the defense technology sector. Anduril looks for candidates who are pragmatic, outcome-oriented, and comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-stakes culture.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process at Anduril is rigorous, direct, and heavily focused on technical depth and practical application. Your journey will typically begin with a recruiter phone screen. This initial conversation is highly targeted; recruiters are looking for an immediate, explicit match between your background and the specific technical requirements of the role. You must be prepared to aggressively advocate for your fit, as the screening process can be stringent and recruiters may directly challenge your qualifications if your resume does not perfectly align with their internal rubrics.

If you pass the initial screen, you will move into technical phone screens that test your algorithmic foundations and coding proficiency. Anduril expects Research Scientists to be strong software engineers. You will likely face live coding challenges focusing on Python, C++, or system-level optimization, alongside deep dives into your past research. The goal here is to ensure you can build what you design.

The final stage is an intensive virtual or on-site loop. This typically involves a research presentation where you will walk a panel through a complex project, followed by several one-on-one sessions. These sessions will cover system design, edge deployment, advanced ML concepts, and behavioral alignment. Expect a highly interactive environment where engineers and scientists will interrupt, ask probing questions, and test the limits of your knowledge.

This visual timeline illustrates the progression from the initial recruiter screen through the technical assessments and the final onsite loop. You should use this to pace your preparation, ensuring your foundational coding skills are sharp for the early rounds, while reserving time to build a compelling, defensible presentation for the final onsite stage. Keep in mind that specific rounds may vary slightly depending on the exact team (e.g., Computer Vision vs. Autonomous Systems) you are interviewing with.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Machine Learning & Algorithmic Foundations

This area tests your theoretical knowledge and your ability to apply it to novel problems. Interviewers want to know if you understand the "under the hood" mechanics of the algorithms you use. Strong performance means you can derive key equations, explain the trade-offs between different model architectures, and identify why a specific approach will fail in a given scenario.

Be ready to go over:

• Computer Vision & Perception – Object detection, tracking, segmentation, and multi-camera calibration.
• Sensor Fusion – Combining data from disparate modalities (EO/IR cameras, radar, LiDAR) to create a unified world model.
• Autonomy & Control – Path planning, reinforcement learning, and state estimation (e.g., Kalman filters).
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Few-shot learning, adversarial robustness in deep learning, and multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through the mathematical formulation of a Kalman filter and explain how it handles non-linearities in a tracking system."
• "How would you design a perception pipeline to detect and classify small, fast-moving aerial objects using both radar and optical sensors?"
• "Explain the trade-offs between using a transformer-based architecture versus a CNN for real-time object detection on edge hardware."

Systems & Edge Deployment

Anduril does not deploy models to massive cloud clusters; they deploy them to drones, towers, and underwater vehicles. This evaluation area tests your ability to write efficient code and optimize models for constrained environments. A strong candidate will demonstrate a deep understanding of memory management, latency reduction, and hardware acceleration.

Be ready to go over:

• C++ and Python Proficiency – Writing clean, production-ready code, understanding object-oriented design, and memory management.
• Model Optimization – Quantization, pruning, and compiling models using tools like TensorRT or ONNX.
• Compute Constraints – Managing latency, power consumption, and thermal limits on edge devices (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson).
• Advanced concepts (less common) – CUDA programming, custom hardware-level optimizations, and real-time operating systems (RTOS).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Describe a time you had to optimize a deep learning model to meet a strict latency requirement. What techniques did you use?"
• "Implement an algorithm to track the trajectory of multiple objects over time. Now, optimize it to run within a strict memory limit."
• "How do you handle dropped frames or asynchronous sensor inputs in a real-time perception system?"

Research to Production & Problem Solving

This area assesses your pragmatic engineering skills. Anduril wants to see how you take a theoretical concept or an academic paper and turn it into a robust, scalable feature for a product like Lattice. Strong candidates will show a bias for action and a clear methodology for testing, iterating, and deploying their research.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Pipelines – Handling messy, real-world data, building annotation pipelines, and managing data drift.
• Evaluation Metrics – Choosing the right metrics for the mission, rather than just optimizing for academic benchmarks like mAP.
• Failure Modes – Identifying edge cases, understanding how models fail in the real world, and designing fallback mechanisms.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Continuous learning, simulation-to-reality (sim2real) transfer, and synthetic data generation.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "You have a model that performs perfectly in simulation but fails during field testing. Walk me through your debugging process."
• "Design a system to continuously collect and train on edge-case data from deployed autonomous assets."
• "How do you balance the need for a highly accurate model with the reality of limited compute and bandwidth in a contested environment?"

Mission Fit & Behavioral

Anduril’s culture is intense, mission-driven, and highly collaborative. Behavioral questions are used to gauge your resilience, your ability to communicate complex ideas to non-experts, and your alignment with the company’s goals. Strong candidates will demonstrate ownership, a willingness to tackle unglamorous tasks, and a clear understanding of why defense technology matters.

Be ready to go over:

• Navigating Ambiguity – How you operate when requirements are unclear or rapidly changing.
• Stakeholder Communication – Bridging the gap between research, software engineering, and hardware operations.
• Handling Pushback – How you respond to technical disagreements or critical feedback from peers.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Leading cross-functional tiger teams, managing external defense stakeholders.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you strongly disagreed with a technical direction. How did you handle the pushback, and what was the outcome?"
• "Describe a project where the initial requirements completely changed halfway through. How did you adapt?"
• "Why do you want to work in the defense technology sector, and why specifically at Anduril?"

Key Responsibilities

As a Research Scientist at Anduril, your day-to-day work will be dynamic and highly cross-functional. You will spend a significant portion of your time developing and prototyping novel algorithms for computer vision, tracking, and autonomy. This involves reading recent literature, writing experimental code in Python and PyTorch, and rigorously testing your hypotheses against massive datasets collected from Anduril’s deployed assets.

Beyond prototyping, you are responsible for the deployment lifecycle of your research. You will collaborate closely with software engineers to translate your Python prototypes into highly optimized C++ code suitable for edge deployment. You will work alongside hardware engineers to understand the specific constraints of the sensors and compute modules on platforms like the Sentry Tower or Ghost Shark. This requires a deep understanding of the entire system architecture, not just the machine learning model.

Finally, you will frequently participate in field testing and rapid iteration cycles. When a system is deployed in a real-world exercise, you will analyze the telemetry and performance data, identify failure modes, and push updates to improve the system's capabilities. You will act as a technical leader, guiding the broader engineering team on the art of the possible and ensuring that Anduril’s AI capabilities remain cutting-edge and operationally effective.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for a Research Scientist role at Anduril, you must possess a strong blend of academic rigor and practical engineering capability. The company looks for individuals who can bridge the gap between abstract research and concrete product impact.

• Must-have technical skills – Deep expertise in Python and C++; mastery of deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow); strong foundation in linear algebra, probability, and algorithmic design; experience with edge deployment and optimization.
• Must-have experience – A Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field; a proven track record of solving complex problems in computer vision, sensor fusion, or autonomy; eligibility for U.S. security clearance (U.S. Person status is typically required).
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with CUDA, TensorRT, or ONNX; familiarity with radar, LiDAR, or acoustic sensor processing; background in reinforcement learning or multi-agent systems.
• Soft skills – Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex research to cross-functional teams; high resilience and adaptability; a strong sense of ownership and urgency.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of technical and behavioral challenges you will face during the Anduril interview process. They are drawn from actual candidate experiences and are designed to test both your theoretical depth and your practical engineering skills. Use these to identify patterns in how Anduril evaluates candidates, rather than as a strict memorization list.

Algorithmic & ML Theory

This category tests your fundamental understanding of the math and theory behind the models you use.

• Explain the vanishing gradient problem and the mathematical mechanisms used to mitigate it in modern architectures.
• Walk me through the architecture of a transformer and explain how self-attention scales with sequence length.
• How would you formulate a multi-target tracking problem using a probabilistic framework?
• Derive the update steps for a standard Kalman filter.
• What are the trade-offs between using a generative approach versus a discriminative approach for anomaly detection in sensor data?

Coding & Implementation

These questions assess your ability to write clean, efficient, and bug-free code under pressure.

• Implement an algorithm to find the intersection over union (IoU) of two rotated bounding boxes.
• Write a Python function to efficiently sample data from a highly imbalanced dataset.
• Implement a custom loss function in PyTorch that penalizes false negatives more heavily than false positives.
• Given a stream of noisy sensor coordinates, write a C++ class to maintain a moving average and filter out extreme outliers.
• Solve a classic graph traversal problem (e.g., A* search) optimized for a grid with dynamic obstacles.

System Design & Edge Deployment

This section evaluates your ability to architect solutions that work in the real world, subject to hardware constraints.

• Design an end-to-end perception pipeline for a drone that must detect and track vehicles in real-time using only an onboard Jetson Nano.
• How would you optimize a large vision model to reduce its inference latency by 50% without significantly degrading accuracy?
• Walk me through how you would design a system to synchronize and fuse data from an optical camera and a radar operating at different frame rates.
• Describe your approach to handling out-of-memory (OOM) errors when deploying models to edge devices.
• How do you design a software architecture to gracefully handle intermittent network connectivity between an edge device and a central command node?

Behavioral & Mission Alignment

These questions gauge your cultural fit, your resilience, and your ability to work collaboratively in a high-stakes environment.

• Tell me about a time you had to pivot your research direction because your initial approach failed.
• Describe a situation where you had to explain a highly complex technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder.
• How do you handle situations where you receive strong pushback on your technical proposals?
• Tell me about the most complex engineering or research problem you have solved end-to-end.
• Why are you interested in defense technology, and what draws you to Anduril specifically?

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need an active security clearance to be hired? While an active clearance is highly beneficial, it is not strictly required for all roles at the time of hiring. However, because of the nature of the work, you must generally be eligible to obtain a U.S. security clearance, which typically requires U.S. citizenship.

Q: How should I handle the initial recruiter phone screen? Treat the recruiter screen as a rigorous technical filter. Recruiters at Anduril evaluate your background against strict internal rubrics. Be highly explicit about how your skills directly map to the role's requirements, and advocate strongly for your fit to avoid being prematurely screened out.

Q: What is the culture like for a Research Scientist at Anduril? The culture is intense, fast-paced, and deeply pragmatic. You are expected to be a "full-stack" researcher—meaning you conceptualize the math, write the code, and help deploy it to hardware. There is little room for pure, detached academic research; everything must drive operational value.

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? The process usually takes between 3 to 5 weeks from the initial recruiter screen to the final offer. The timeline can vary based on your availability for the technical screens and the coordination of the final onsite presentation panel.

Q: Is remote work an option for this role? Anduril strongly prefers in-person collaboration, especially for roles that interact with hardware and sensitive systems. While hybrid flexibility exists, you should expect to be onsite at one of their major engineering hubs (such as Costa Mesa, CA, or Broomfield, CO) for the majority of the work week.

Other General Tips

• Bridge the Gap Between Theory and Practice: Always connect your academic or theoretical knowledge to real-world deployment. When discussing a model, proactively mention how you would optimize it for edge compute or handle noisy, real-world data.
• Defend Your Choices: Expect interviewers to challenge your methodologies. Do not take this personally; it is a test of your technical conviction and reasoning. Defend your choices with data, but remain open to pivoting if presented with new constraints.
• Know the Hardware: Familiarize yourself with Anduril’s product ecosystem (Lattice, Ghost Shark, Sentry, etc.). Understanding the physical platforms where your algorithms will live demonstrates strong mission alignment and systems thinking.
• Prepare for Directness: The communication style at Anduril is highly direct. If an interviewer interrupts you or asks a blunt question, stay composed and answer concisely. They are testing your ability to communicate efficiently under pressure.

Summary & Next Steps

Interviewing for a Research Scientist position at Anduril Industries is an intense but incredibly rewarding process. This role offers the rare opportunity to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence while directly contributing to technologies that safeguard national security. You will be challenged to demonstrate not only your deep theoretical expertise in machine learning and computer vision but also your ability to engineer robust, deployable solutions for the tactical edge.

To succeed, focus your preparation on mastering your foundational algorithms, refining your C++ and Python coding skills, and practicing how to articulate complex system design trade-offs. Remember to approach the interviews with confidence and a readiness to defend your technical decisions. The pushback you experience is a feature of the process, designed to simulate the rigorous, collaborative environment you will join.

This compensation data provides a baseline expectation for the Research Scientist role. Keep in mind that total compensation at Anduril often includes a competitive base salary alongside significant equity components, which scale based on your seniority, specialized expertise, and interview performance.

You have the skills and the drive to excel in this process. Continue to refine your technical narrative, leverage resources like Dataford for additional interview insights, and stay focused on the real-world impact of your research. Approach each conversation as an opportunity to showcase your ability to build the future of defense technology. Good luck!