Winter 2027 Research Engineer Co-op

About the Role

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company transforming military capabilities with advanced technology. Maritime Digital Production builds and deploys the technology stack powering Anduril's shipbuilding factories, focusing on data infrastructure, manufacturing execution systems, scheduling, and AI systems. This role is an algorithms engineering position with a research flavor, focused on improving a computational geometry engine for disassembly sequence planning. The goal is a measurably faster engine that maintains output equivalence.

Key Responsibilities

• Profiling a C++ computational geometry pipeline on real assemblies and reporting where time and memory go.
• Designing and implementing algorithmic improvements to a disassembly sequence search: candidate ordering, pruning, memoization, and incremental graph updates.
• Decomposing large assemblies into subassemblies that can be solved independently.
• Parallelizing expensive geometric tests across cores without losing determinism.
• Building a benchmark corpus and harness that run in continuous integration and catch regressions.
• Gating every optimization on output equivalence against a reference set.
• Writing up results and presenting them to the engineering team.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Must be pursuing a master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field.
• Must be returning to school at the end of the internship to continue academic studies for at least one quarter or semester.
• Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export-controlled information or facilities; U.S. clearance eligibility may be required depending on program.
• Ability to complete an in-person co-op in Santa Ana, CA, in winter 2027.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong modern C++, C++17 or later.
• Solid algorithms and data structures, including graph algorithms, combinatorial search and pruning, and complexity analysis.
• Computational geometry fundamentals: triangle meshes, spatial indexes, intersection and collision tests.
• Experience profiling and optimizing code.
• Research or coursework in assembly sequence planning, disassembly planning, or motion planning.
• Publications at ICRA, IROS, RSS, SoCG, or Solid and Physical Modeling, or in the Computer-Aided Design journal.
• Experience with Eigen, OpenCASCADE, OpenVDB, CGAL, or a collision or bounding volume hierarchy library.
• Parallel programming in C++ with Intel TBB, OpenMP, or standard threads, with attention to determinism.
• Familiarity with CAD data and formats such as STEP and JT.
• Experience with CMake, GoogleTest, and reproducible builds. Nix is a plus.
• Python for tooling and analysis, e.g. NumPy and trimesh.
• Familiarity with infinitesimal motion analysis or rotational motions in assembly planning.

Compensation

• US Hourly Range: $60—$75 USD.
• The salary range is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations.