Startup Munitions Firm Anduril has Big Boys in its Software Cross-Hairs

Wunderkind inventor Palmer Luckey is making waves again after his weapons startup, Anduril, won a multi-billion dollar defense contract from the U.S. Airforce, leaving the old guard—Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, etc.—looking more than a little dusty.

Luckey’s weapons venture, founded in 2017 after the millenial’s sale of Oculus VR to Facebook, has been tasked with prototyping a new class of drones, called Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The mandate for these weapons—like most everything else these days, from tractors to toothbrushes—is AI-guided autonomy. Smarter weapons, developed more quickly and cheaply, call for enhanced software capabilities.

Investigating LinkUp jobs data for Anduril and its legacy competitors over the last three years bears this message out. With extensive conflict roiling the globe and American munitions companies stocking the armories, we’d expect to see a trend of increased hiring across all major defense contractors.

Because Anduril is a considerably smaller company than competitors, we’ve leveraged the Daily Active Jobs Index on Compass to demonstrate relative growth.

Instead, our Compass comparison tool shows a gradual hiring decline across Anduril’s competition against a robust climb in job openings for the startup.

Taking our job opening data a click deeper, Compass filters active jobs against O*NET codes to render a breakdown of the major occupations each of the defense contractors is hiring for. Anduril emerges as an outlier in Computer & Mathematical hiring, with a leading 51.86% of job openings allotted to that department.

The Occupation Detail tool on Compass takes us under the hood to see which roles in particular Anduril is hiring for within the Computer and Mathematical bucket. No surprise, we find a consistent pattern of prioritizing software hires. As the American government continues its push for more clinical and effective weapons systems, dynamic and easily updated software will determine winners and losers—on the battlefield and for Pentagon pitch decks.

While Anduril has won the prototyping phase of the CCA contract, the old timers will be back to contend for incremental build-out stages. With a planned spend of up to $9 Billion on the CCA program, you’d think the Lockheed Martins of the world would be paying serious attention to their software engineer hiring strategy. LinkUp data tells a different story. The Compass chart below shows a steady decline in software hiring at Lockheed Martin in the last three years, with no apparent urgency to compete with the cool new software wonks on the block.

Keep ahead of the company curve with LinkUp Compass: it’s the job market, now in living color. And stay tuned for more of our Notes from The Evidence Lab, where we showcase the engaging interface and unmatched specificity of our job market dataset.

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