Platform Software Security Engineer, Air Defense

Title: Platform Software Security Engineer, Air Defense Location: Irvine, California, United States

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Air Defense team builds robots that find other robots and knock them out of the sky. At a time when air superiority can no longer be taken for granted, the Air Defense Team provides mission critical capabilities to warfighters. From detection to tracking, identification, deterrence, and defeat, our family of networked sensors and effectors enables our customers to rapidly close the kill chain against a broad range of Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) threats. Working across product, engineering, sales, logistics, operations, and mission success, the Air Defense team develops, tests, deploys, and sustains the Anduril Air Defense Family of Systems (FoS) in challenging operational environments worldwide.

ABOUT THE JOB
Air Defense products are deployed to austere and often secure environments, some in contexts where the device itself is a sensitive asset and physical access by an adversary is a realistic threat. That makes product security a hardware-and-software problem, not a policy exercise. As our international portfolio grows—the compliance and exportability requirements on our platform are growing with it. We're hiring for someone to focus on these challenges, a Software Engineer to own product security for the Air Defense platforms.
This is a new role, born from the recognition that security for fielded defense hardware is a nuanced discipline that deserves focused investment rather than ad-hoc coverage. You'll be the technical driver for security on the platform—hands-on with embedded Linux, firmware, and hardware interfaces—while also serving as the connective tissue between the teams whose work has to come together for the product to ship securely. You'll also drive the hands-on platform work that supports it—updating firmware, updating fusing tools, improving encryption algorithms, and building and re-imaging towers using our NixOS-based build system.
WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Drive hands-on platform security work: updating firmware, improving encryption algorithms, updating fusing tools, and building and re-imaging towers through our NixOS-based image pipeline.
• Own the signed boot chain across compute generations: firmware and bootloader signing, UEFI Secure Boot key hierarchies, signed kernel and initrd, and full-disk encryption with automated unlock.
• Own signing key management and the infrastructure behind it: HSM-backed keys, separation of development and production trust roots, key rotation, and build-time enforcement that the right keys sign the right artifacts.
• Define and implement the platform's hardening postures, spanning network exposure and firewall policy, privilege and sudo restriction, serial console and USB lockdown, and the difference between a locked-down fielded system and a debuggable bench unit.
• Drive vulnerability management for the fielded fleet: track CVEs against our kernel and userspace, own the patching strategy for hardware approaching vendor end-of-life, and keep a clear picture of fleet security state.
• Serve as the technical interface between engineering, product, and program teams decomposing security requirements into concrete engineering tasks and driving them to completion across the platform.
• Partner with our product security organization to turn security requirements into shippable implementations, act as the team's security liaison, and support program-specific accreditation and exportability efforts as our international portfolio grows.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 4+ years of professional software engineering with a security focus on embedded Linux systems.
• Hands-on experience implementing a secure boot chain: code signing, chain of trust, UEFI Secure Boot or an equivalent vendor secure boot implementation.
• Practical cryptographic engineering skills: PKI and certificate hierarchies, HSM or PKCS#11-backed signing, key lifecycle management, and full-disk encryption.
• Strong Linux internals knowledge, particularly in patching, boot flow, kernel and initrd, systemd, privilege boundaries, and filesystem and device access control.
• Proficiency in C, C++, or Rust, plus the ability to work fluently in shell.
• Experience building or modifying embedded Linux system images—Yocto, Buildroot, or NixOS. Comfort working at the layer where OS configuration meets hardware bring-up.
• Practical hardening and vulnerability-management experience on real systems: attack-surface reduction, CVE triage on a deployed fleet, and live patching strategies that don't break the product.
• Ability to work hands-on with hardware—comfortable at a lab bench interfacing with compute boards, serial consoles, and firmware tooling.
• Ability to explain a security decision to engineers who need to implement it, and to a program stakeholder who needs to accept the residual risk.
• US person status required. Active US Secret clearance, or a previously granted Secret clearance eligible for reactivation.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with NVIDIA Jetson secure boot specifically, or with another SoC vendor's secure boot and fusing workflow.
• Familiarity with measured boot, TPMs, or remote attestation.
• Experience with NixOS or Nix for building system images. Adjacent depth in Yocto or Buildroot is a strong substitute—these are the most transferable skill sets to our NixOS-based platform.
• Background in defense or government accreditation processes, or work against a formal security controls framework. Experience with international exportability requirements is a plus.
• Offensive security experience, including hardware attacks such as bus sniffing, glitching, or JTAG and boot interruption.
• Experience with supply chain security, artifact provenance, or SBOM tooling.
• Experience bringing new hardware features to life through software—bridging the gap between hardware capabilities and the platform software that exercises them.