Anduril has become one of the most talked-about names in defense tech, and it's also one of the most active hirers of RF and electronic warfare engineers in the country right now. If you're considering applying, here's what the RF-specific roles there actually look like, based on job posting patterns, public compensation data, and what candidates in the industry report about the interview and work experience.

What kind of RF work is actually happening there

Anduril's RF and EW hiring clusters heavily around a few product lines: Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) systems for non-kinetic effects, Lattice-integrated sensor systems that include radar and RF sensing, and counter-UAS products that depend heavily on RF detection and jamming. If you look at their open roles at any given time, EW and radar-adjacent postings usually outnumber pure antenna or RFIC design roles.

This matters because it tells you what kind of RF engineer thrives there. Anduril isn't primarily a component design shop — it's a systems company building integrated products fast, which means RF engineers there tend to work close to the system level: understanding how RF hardware interacts with software-defined processing, autonomy stacks, and the broader Lattice OS platform, rather than doing pure component-level microwave design in isolation.

The pace is different from a traditional defense prime

This is the thing candidates from Raytheon, Northrop, or L3Harris backgrounds consistently mention as the biggest adjustment. Anduril runs closer to a fast-moving tech company than a traditional defense contractor, even though the end customer is the same. Program timelines are compressed. Hardware iteration cycles are faster. There's less bureaucratic overhead between an engineer having an idea and getting it into a test article, but there's also less structure and more ambiguity than engineers coming from established primes are used to.

Engineers who like that pace describe it as energizing — you see your work turn into fielded systems faster than at a traditional prime. Engineers who prefer more defined scope and slower, more deliberate engineering processes sometimes find it chaotic. Know which one you are before you interview.

Clearance requirements

Most of the meaningful EW and RF sensing work at Anduril requires an active clearance, frequently Secret at minimum and often Top Secret or TS/SCI for the more sensitive programs (their job postings for "Special Programs" or classified EW work make this explicit). If you don't currently hold a clearance, expect Anduril to be selective about sponsoring — they tend to prioritize candidates who already have one, given how much of their work sits behind a classification boundary.

Compensation

Anduril pays competitively relative to traditional defense primes, and the equity component is real — this isn't a company handing out symbolic RSUs. Based on public compensation data and postings:

Entry-level RF/EW engineers (0–3 years): roughly $115,000–$150,000 base, plus equity

Mid-level (3–8 years): roughly $150,000–$195,000 base, plus equity

Senior/Staff engineers with relevant EW or radar background: $195,000–$260,000+ base, plus meaningfully larger equity grants

The equity is the variable that's hardest to pin down from outside the company, since it depends heavily on level, timing, and negotiation, but it's a real part of total comp and shouldn't be ignored when comparing an Anduril offer against a prime contractor offer with a traditional pension or 401k match instead.

What the interview process looks like

Candidates report a technical screen focused heavily on fundamentals — link budgets, EW basics, radar theory if relevant to the specific team — followed by a more system-level design discussion where you're expected to reason through tradeoffs on the spot rather than recite memorized answers. Anduril interviewers lean toward assessing how you think under ambiguity, since that's what the job actually looks like day to day.

Expect at least one round focused on "why Anduril" and cultural fit. This isn't a formality — they're genuinely trying to filter for people who want the mission-driven, fast-paced environment and will screen out candidates who seem like they're just chasing the brand name or the compensation without buy-in to the actual work.

Who does well there

Engineers who've thrived at Anduril based on what we see in the market tend to have a systems mindset even if their formal background is component-level RF design — they're comfortable with ambiguity, they don't need every requirement spelled out before they start working, and they're motivated by seeing hardware get fielded quickly rather than by working on a single well-defined problem for years.

If you're the kind of RF engineer who wants deep, narrow specialization in one discipline (pure antenna design, pure RFIC layout) with a slower, more traditional engineering cadence, a large prime or a specialized RF component company might be a better fit than Anduril's broader systems environment.

Browse current Anduril openings on RF Careers, or see all RF engineering jobs across the industry.