Senior Quality Engineer, Applied AI
Costa Mesa · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00) · USD 191,000-253,000 · 8+ years experience · Full-time · Posted Sep 29, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 8+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Location
- Costa Mesa · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00)
- Salary
- USD 191,000-253,000 · Base salary
About the role
- Mission Control is the team responsible for quality assurance, release management, and incident management across the systems Anduril's factories run on.
- This role serves as the senior technical anchor for proving that seams hold across PLM, ERP, MES, and WMS when product lines move from design to a finished article.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own automated system integration tests that exercise Anduril product lines end to end across multiple systems, rather than validating single services in isolation.
- Simulate production workload and data for those product lines so tests reflect what the factory actually does, and build mechanisms that detect when the simulation drifts from reality.
- Leverage AI to author, maintain, and triage tests faster, and turn that into capability for others so the people closest to the problems can ensure quality themselves.
- Reason about distributed architecture and reconcile intent, implementation, and observed production reality, tracing failures across service, network, and vendor boundaries to the actual cause.
- Set test strategy, release readiness criteria, and quality gates for the release train, and make them fast enough that teams choose to use them.
- Build the observability, instrumentation, and environment strategy that turn a failing test or a production incident into a clear, actionable signal.
- Partner with the engineering teams that own the systems under test, and with business partners on the floor, to move quality upstream into design and acceptance criteria.
- Contribute directly in code, infrastructure, and tooling to improve developer feedback loops, test reliability, and production stability.
- Support launch readiness, production issue response, root cause analysis, and post-incident follow-through, with a bias toward eliminating classes of failure rather than repeatedly reacting to them.
- Set the technical standard for testing craft across Mission Control through review, pairing, and example, without becoming a bottleneck or a bureaucracy.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, software development engineering in test, site reliability engineering, quality engineering, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related role in a fast-paced environment.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating automated integration or end-to-end test suites for production systems, including ownership of environments, test data, and CI execution.
- Strong technical fluency in modern software architectures, APIs, distributed systems, CI/CD, and cloud or platform infrastructure.
- Experience reasoning about failures that cross system boundaries, with strong debugging, root cause analysis, and incident response instincts.
- Experience working with frontier AI tooling, AI coding assistants, or agentic systems, including awareness of the quality and reliability challenges these systems introduce.
- Ability to move between hands-on implementation and systems-level quality strategy, with sound judgment on where rigor is required versus where speed is appropriate.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence senior engineers, cross-functional stakeholders, and business partners on quality and reliability trade-offs.
- Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- U.S. Person status is required as this position needs to access export controlled data.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience testing enterprise or manufacturing systems such as ERP, MES, WMS, PLM, or CRM, particularly workflows that span several of them.
- Experience generating or anonymizing production-like data and load for test environments, and detecting drift between test assumptions and production behavior.
- Experience with modern browser and API automation frameworks such as Playwright, along with strategies for keeping large suites fast and non-flaky.
- Experience supporting AI-first or AI-accelerated engineering teams, including designing quality controls around non-deterministic system behavior.
- Experience with infrastructure as code, cloud platforms, observability stacks, release engineering, and production operations.
- Experience in hyper growth startup-like environments, with demonstrated success balancing speed, ambiguity, and engineering rigor.
- Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance.
Benefits
- Competitive equity grants
- Top-tier benefits for full-time employees supporting health, recovery, and other needs
Skills
- Playwright
- CI/CD
- APIs
- Observability
- Infrastructure As Code
- ERP
- MES
- WMS
- PLM
- CRM
