Senior Program Manager (UAE)

About the Company

Anduril Industries is a defense technology business focused on upgrading the capabilities of U.S. and allied forces through advanced technology. The company applies the pace, engineering depth, and operating model of leading 21st-century tech companies to defense, with an emphasis on autonomy, artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking. Its platform, Lattice OS, combines thousands of live data feeds into a real-time 3D command-and-control environment.

About the Team

This position supports the Maneuver Dominance team in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and is intended to be one of the first on the ground for this effort. The team is working on Omen, a hover-to-cruise autonomous air vehicle that delivers the endurance, payload capacity, and mission flexibility of much larger aircraft in a runway-independent Group 3 platform. Omen can launch and recover from ship decks, beaches, and remote island clearings, enabling freedom of maneuver across both defense and civilian settings. It is also the first tail-sitter aircraft with a mass-production contract, with an order for 50 systems that supports production scale-up and future development.

Role Overview

As the UAE Senior Program Manager, you will help balance innovation with disciplined execution across the Omen program. You will work inside a complex global program environment, guide strategic decisions, review milestones, and manage in-country resourcing. The role calls for quickly learning technical concepts and applying them effectively, using both program management and technical understanding to drive cross-functional outcomes and meaningful program impact.

Supporting Maneuver Dominance requires a strong grasp of mission needs, careful coordination between internal teams and outside stakeholders, and detailed planning in uncertain conditions. You will work independently, create structure in ambiguity, and partner closely with the Omen lead Program Manager based in Costa Mesa, HQ across Air Vehicle, Mission Systems, Support Systems, and Production Systems.

What You Will Do

• Build and sustain relationships with internal teams, customer contacts, and industry partners to gather insight, align priorities, and win support for strategic efforts. Serve as the local point of contact for UAE relationships, including subsystem vendors, local test organizations, facility setup, and customer engagement coordination. Share internal updates on cost projections, schedules, staffing needs, risks, and upside opportunities.
• Drive collaboration across teams by managing, clearing blockers, and speeding up projects that span multiple functions and initiatives. Work closely with leads to keep the roadmap aligned and ensure smooth delivery from development through production, including test operations.
• Take technical ownership of program outcomes by developing a deep understanding of system performance, handling risks and opportunities with engineering leads, using metrics to identify improvement areas, quantifying the impact of investments, and maintaining a clear, customer-ready view of system status.
• Operate independently on broad or unclear requests from external clients, showing strong ownership across all workstreams and becoming a dependable partner to engineering teams.
• Contribute to the creation of technical proposals by accurately defining project scope, estimating effort, and aligning growth opportunities with organizational capabilities and strategic direction.
• Convert business strategy into practical execution plans by defining milestones and guiding initiatives from concept to completion. Oversee the UAE allocation of people, budget, and other resources needed to deliver these initiatives successfully.

Required Qualifications

• At least 8 years of experience in customer-facing program management and/or systems engineering, ideally within defense, national security, or aerospace.
• Demonstrated success leading technical peers to bring hardware or software products into real operational environments through the full product development cycle, including testing.
• Proven ability to lead peers in product and manufacturing through early low-rate production.
• Strong technical understanding and hands-on contributions to technical design, software development lifecycle challenges, and risk resolution, with the ability to work effectively alongside engineering teams.
• Comfort working with internal and external stakeholders at different technical levels.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills.
• Strong analytical, technical, and quantitative capability, with the ability to use data and metrics to support assumptions, recommendations, and decisions.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, maintain a practical roll-up-your-sleeves mindset, and keep progress moving.
• Experience working with international suppliers and customers.
• Ability to obtain a Secret Clearance.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 50%.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, computer science, or a related discipline preferred.
• Experience setting up new facilities or manufacturing spaces.
• Experience using tools such as JIRA and Confluence.

Benefits

The compensation shown for this position is an estimate based on a broad range of pay factors and reflects base salary only. The final offer may differ depending on work experience, education, training, critical skills, and business needs. Most full-time offers also include highly competitive equity grants as part of total compensation.

The company provides a comprehensive benefits package for full-time employees, designed to be available at little to no cost and to support health, recovery, and future needs.

Fraud Prevention Notice

The company warns applicants about recruitment scams and phishing attempts in which fraudsters impersonate recruiters or send fake offers. Candidates should never be asked to pay money or provide sensitive financial information during hiring.

• There are no financial requests at any stage of the hiring process.
• Official recruiter emails come from an @anduril.com address.
• Agency partners will identify themselves clearly; suspicious agencies can be verified by contacting [email protected].
• Do not engage with messages that seem suspicious, contain unusual requests, or have poor grammar.
• If fraudulent outreach is suspected, report it immediately to [email protected].

Data Privacy

Applicants are directed to the company's candidate privacy notice for details about data handling.

By applying, candidates agree that the company may use a third-party provider to perform pre-employment screening for risk, integrity, and due diligence. This may include review of sanctions and watchlists, adverse media, public records, and other lawful open-source or commercial data sources. The provider is not a consumer reporting agency and is used to support legal compliance and protect technology, intellectual property, and organizational security.

Additional Information

This role requires up to 50% travel and the ability to obtain a Secret Clearance. The position is based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and involves close coordination with international suppliers, customers, and cross-functional internal teams.