Anduril
Mock sales call — Head of Systems Engineering. 20 minutes.
Slide Deck
Flow for Anduril
Iterative Requirements & Verification for Multi-Domain Autonomy
Roadrunner, Dive-LD, Omen. Three platforms, one Lattice OS core, three compliance regimes. A design change in the sensor fusion module cascades across classified and unclassified domains simultaneously.
The pace of iteration that makes Anduril competitive cannot coexist with manual V&V. Flow closes the loop.
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Prospect Profile
Anduril is a defense-tech company founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and Brian Schimpf. It sits at the intersection of the two things that define the current defense procurement moment: software moving faster than the acquisition cycle, and hardware that has to be certified to standards written for slower times. Roadrunner, Dive-LD, Bolt, Omen — all built around Lattice OS, a multi-platform operating system that fuses sensor data across air, sea, and undersea domains. Recent contracts: up to $20B from the Army, $86M from SOCOM for autonomy-systems integration.
The engineering culture is deliberately inverted from Lockheed or Raytheon. Hardware serves software. Field validation matters more than PowerPoints. Engineers own cross-functional scope — avionics and autonomy in one role is a job description, not an exception. That cultural posture creates a real tension: iteration speed is the company's competitive advantage, but AS9100 and DO-178C compliance timelines are still largely manual.
Systems Engineering Surface
Lattice OS is the integration point for every Anduril platform. A change to the sensor fusion module affects Roadrunner's autonomy envelope, Dive-LD's comms stack, Omen's formation logic, and any third-party platform connected through the Lattice SDK. The coupling is real and structural — not siloed by program — which is exactly what makes traceability hard to do with per-program tools.
Job posting signals are useful here. Anduril is actively hiring “Systems Engineer — Requirements Manager” roles that explicitly mention SysML, SRR/PDR/CDR gate ownership, and traceability. “Test Infrastructure Lead” and “SITL/HITL automation” roles indicate the test infrastructure is sophisticated but disconnected from the requirements surface. The compliance evidence packaging is happening manually, after the fact.
Pain Points
Integration surprises across classified and unclassified domains.A Roadrunner payload change cascades to Lattice datalink APIs, autonomy logic, ground station firmware, and encrypted uplink protocols simultaneously. The classified/unclassified split means the same requirement lives in two tools that don't talk to each other. When one changes, someone syncs the other manually. That gap is where integration surprises live until hardware test.
SRR/PDR/CDR gate ceremonies that run too long. Design review gates are supposed to be technical discussions. At scale they become compliance evidence marathons: assembling PDFs from git logs, test reports, and hazard analyses spread across a dozen tools. Flow makes gate readiness a live query, not a week-long document assembly exercise.
DO-178C evidence generated retroactively.The standard requires demonstrating code review traceability before code, planned tests before execution. In practice, that evidence gets generated from git history after the fact. It's auditable but it's not the control the standard is designed to require. Flow makes it a side-effect of the CI run, not a tax on top of it.
Test results disconnected from requirements.Anduril runs SITL and HIL automation that's technically sophisticated — Speedgoat, dSpace rigs, Crucible integrated test events spanning hardware, software, and ops. But the test results aren't linked to specific requirements. “Did the test cover this requirement?” is a question that currently requires manual cross-referencing.
Flow Integrations at Anduril Scale
GitHub to compliance evidence automatically.Lattice module commit triggers GitHub Actions SITL suite. Flow webhook receives test results, updates the requirement's verification record, and auto-stamps the DO-178C “code reviewed + tested” checklist item with the PR number as evidence. The compliance package is a side-effect of development, not a separate deliverable.
FEA and physics simulations as live design values. ANSYS wing FEA for Roadrunner, depth pressure models for Dive-LD — results push to Flow as design values. When actual margins degrade below requirements, Flow flags downstream requirements. The coupling between simulation result and certification requirement is explicit and queryable.
HIL rig automation as verification ingestion. Speedgoat and dSpace HIL rigs run Lattice autonomy stack tests against hardware. Each test run links to the requirements it covers. Crucible cross-domain events — Roadrunner + Lattice + Dive-LD comms tested together — populate traceability across platform boundaries in a single test event.
Gate readiness as a live dashboard. SRR/PDR/CDR checklist lives in Flow. As requirements finalize, tests pass, and hazard analyses sign off, the gate form auto-populates. The PDR committee sees a 94% readiness score before they walk in the room. The two open items are specific, not buried in a spreadsheet. Technical review replaces administrative ceremony.