What is a DevOps Engineer at Anduril?

As a DevOps Engineer at Anduril, you are not just maintaining standard cloud infrastructure; you are the backbone of a company building the next generation of defense technology. Anduril operates at the intersection of aerospace, hardware, and artificial intelligence. Your work directly enables the rapid deployment of Lattice OS—the company’s core software platform—across cloud environments, secure government enclaves, and ruggedized edge devices deployed in austere environments.

The impact of this position is massive. You will build the deployment pipelines, infrastructure, and automation that allow software engineers to push updates to autonomous drones, sentry towers, and command centers reliably and securely. Because Anduril products must function in disconnected or highly constrained environments, the infrastructure challenges you will solve are far more complex than typical web-scale SaaS operations.

In this role, you will navigate a unique blend of massive cloud scale and strict edge-computing limitations. You will work closely with embedded engineers, AI researchers, and product teams to ensure that critical defense systems remain highly available, secure, and easily updatable. Expect a fast-paced, mission-driven environment where your technical decisions directly influence the safety and effectiveness of end-users in the field.

Common Interview Questions

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation for an Anduril interview requires a shift in mindset. You must demonstrate not only deep technical competence but also a strong bias for action and an understanding of hardware-software integration.

Technical Depth and Systems Thinking – Interviewers will test your understanding of modern infrastructure, from the Linux kernel up to distributed systems. You must demonstrate how you design systems that are resilient, scalable, and capable of operating in non-traditional environments (like edge devices with intermittent connectivity).

Infrastructure as Code Mastery – Anduril relies heavily on automation to manage complex deployments across varied environments. You will be evaluated on your ability to write clean, modular, and heavily tested infrastructure code, as well as your familiarity with declarative system management.

Troubleshooting and First-Principles Problem Solving – When a deployment fails on a remote sensor tower, you cannot always SSH into it easily. Interviewers will assess how you isolate issues, debug complex distributed systems, and apply first-principles thinking to solve problems you have never encountered before.

Mission Alignment and Culture Fit – Anduril moves incredibly fast and tackles high-stakes defense problems. You will be evaluated on your ability to handle ambiguity, take extreme ownership of your systems, and communicate effectively across diverse engineering disciplines.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a DevOps Engineer at Anduril is rigorous, practical, and highly technical. It is designed to evaluate how you perform under realistic engineering constraints rather than testing you on abstract trivia. The process moves quickly, reflecting the company’s strong bias for action.

Typically, your journey will begin with a recruiter screen to assess your background, clearance eligibility (if applicable), and mission alignment. This is followed by a technical phone screen with an engineer, which usually involves a collaborative coding or scripting exercise, alongside foundational infrastructure questions. Anduril prioritizes engineers who can write robust automation, so expect to write actual code in Python, Go, or Bash.

The onsite loop is comprehensive and usually consists of four to five rounds. You will face a system design interview focused on infrastructure architecture, a deep-dive troubleshooting session, an infrastructure-as-code practical assessment, and a behavioral round with engineering leadership. Throughout the onsite, interviewers will look for your ability to communicate trade-offs clearly and adapt your designs to the unique constraints of defense technology.

This timeline illustrates the typical progression from your initial recruiter screen through the technical phone screen and the multi-stage onsite loop. Use this visual to pace your preparation, ensuring you review coding and scripting early in the process before shifting your focus to complex system design and deep-dive troubleshooting for the final rounds.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in the Anduril interview loop, you must demonstrate mastery across several core infrastructure domains. Interviewers will push past surface-level knowledge to see how well you understand the underlying mechanics of your tools.

Infrastructure as Code and Declarative Systems

Anduril manages a highly complex matrix of deployments spanning public clouds, secure government clouds, and edge hardware. You will be heavily evaluated on your ability to automate and manage these environments reliably.

Be ready to go over:

• Terraform and CloudFormation – Structuring state, writing modular code, and managing multi-environment deployments.
• Nix and NixOS – Understanding reproducible builds and declarative system configuration (a critical component of Anduril's stack).
• CI/CD Pipelines – Building robust deployment pipelines using tools like Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Advanced concepts – Managing drift in disconnected environments, zero-downtime deployments to edge hardware, and immutable infrastructure patterns.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would structure a Terraform repository to deploy the same application across AWS Commercial, AWS GovCloud, and a local on-premise cluster."
• "How do you handle secrets management in a CI/CD pipeline that deploys to a disconnected environment?"
• "Explain the concept of reproducible builds and why they are valuable in a highly secure environment."

Containerization and Orchestration

Because Lattice OS is deployed everywhere from the cloud to ruggedized servers in the field, container orchestration is a major focus. You must deeply understand Kubernetes and container internals.

Be ready to go over:

• Kubernetes Architecture – The control plane, etcd, kubelet, and how components interact.
• Container Internals – Namespaces, cgroups, and the Linux kernel mechanisms that make containers work.
• Edge Orchestration – Running lightweight Kubernetes distributions (like K3s) on resource-constrained hardware.
• Advanced concepts – Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), operators, and debugging network policies (Calico/Cilium).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A pod is stuck in a CrashLoopBackOff state on a node with intermittent network connectivity. Walk me through your debugging steps."
• "How would you design a Kubernetes cluster architecture for a fleet of 500 autonomous drones that occasionally lose connection to the central control plane?"
• "Explain how container networking works under the hood when two pods on different nodes need to communicate."

Linux Internals and Networking

A strong DevOps Engineer at Anduril must be highly proficient in Linux. You will be tested on your ability to debug complex OS-level and network-level issues from first principles.

Be ready to go over:

• System Performance – CPU, memory, disk I/O, and using tools like strace, tcpdump, htop, and perf.
• Networking Fundamentals – TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, routing, and VPNs (WireGuard, IPSec).
• Security and Permissions – SELinux, AppArmor, IAM, and zero-trust network architectures.
• Advanced concepts – eBPF for observability, debugging kernel panics, and securing air-gapped systems.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "You type curl https://anduril.com and it hangs. Walk me through every layer of the network stack to troubleshoot the issue."
• "How would you securely connect a remote sensor tower over a public LTE network back to a secure AWS GovCloud environment?"
• "Explain how you would use strace to figure out why a newly deployed binary is failing to start."

Scripting and Automation

Anduril treats infrastructure as a software engineering discipline. You will be expected to write clean, efficient code to automate operational tasks, build tooling, and interact with APIs.

Be ready to go over:

• Python or Go – Writing robust scripts, handling errors, and interacting with REST/gRPC APIs.
• Bash Scripting – Automating quick tasks and writing reliable startup scripts.
• Data Parsing – Manipulating JSON, YAML, and log formats efficiently.
• Advanced concepts – Concurrency in Go, building custom CLI tools for developer experience, and writing testable automation code.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a Python script that paginates through an AWS API to find all unattached EBS volumes and outputs their IDs to a file."
• "Given a massive log file, write a Bash one-liner to find the top 10 IP addresses that generated 500 errors."
• "Implement a concurrent worker pool in Go to process a queue of deployment tasks."