Senior Software Engineer, Simulation Platform

Anduril Anduril · Defense · Costa Mesa, CA · Software : Software Platform : Mission Simulation

Senior Software Engineer role focused on the core architecture and infrastructure of a high-fidelity, multi-domain military mission simulator. The simulator models entities, supports training, mission planning, autonomy development, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. The role involves optimizing performance, developing the Entity-Component-System architecture, plugin systems, and integration with other systems like gRPC and DIS. It is a mature C++20 codebase.

What you'd actually do

  1. Performance and scale — keep the simulation loop fast enough for real-time and faster-than-real-time execution with hundreds of concurrent entities; reasoning about memory layout, cache behavior, and contention as entity counts grow
  2. Custom Entity-Component-System architecture that underpins the entire simulator: entity lifecycle, component storage, system registration, and the update loop
  3. Plugin and SDK development: maintain a versioned C ABI, enabling external teams to extend the simulator
  4. Integration architecture: gRPC services, DIS protocol interoperability, networking messaging, and file recording for playback
  5. Support domain experts in integrating new and enhancing existing capability models

Skills

Required

  • 3 years of professional experience with C++20 and strong C++ skills
  • Experience designing internal APIs and frameworks that other engineers build on
  • Solid understanding of systems programming fundamentals: memory management, shared libraries, ABI stability, linking, and platform-level concerns
  • Comfort with linear algebra and applied math
  • Familiarity with Linux based C++ development toolchains
  • Ability to reason about performance-sensitive code--cache behavior, memory layout, algorithmic complexity
  • Clear technical communication and ability to work in a large, shared codebase with architectural decision making that impacts a growing team
  • Eligibility to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Government Secret security clearance

Nice to have

  • 5+ years of professional experience with C++20
  • Experience with military simulation, defense modeling & simulation (M&S), or related domains
  • Experience with Entity-Component-System architectures or game engine design patterns
  • Familiarity with gRPC, DIS (IEEE 1278.1) distributed simulation standard
  • Experience with Python/C++ interop (pybind11, embedded interpreters)
  • Familiarity with behavior trees or autonomous agent architectures
  • Exposure to Nix for reproducible builds
  • Experience with numerical simulation, physics modeling, or scientific computing

What the JD emphasized

  • C++20
  • framework code
  • systems programming fundamentals
  • performance-sensitive code
  • architectural decision making