How Anduril Pays

Technical ladder — L3 through L8

Commercial ladder — reported business development

Management ladder — Director through Senior Director

Executive — VP through CEO

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• The L3 through L8 numbering comes from a third-party salary database. Anduril does not publish level codes, level definitions or a title-to-level map, and its early-careers page describes recent graduates only as typically nought to two years post-graduation.
• Experience ranges in this report are market interpretation. Anduril appears willing to level on scope, critical skills and programme need rather than a tenure clock, and no years-per-level schedule is published.
• Non-engineering role families are reported only as whole-family medians rather than by level: Mechanical Engineer at $200,188, Hardware Engineer at $189,500, Electrical Engineer at $227,036, Technical Program Manager at $209,063, Business Operations at $232,500, Program Manager at $282,465, Chief of Staff at $326,625 and Sales at $278,385. Those medians are carried here as context rather than as priced bands, because they have no published base, bonus and equity split.
• A $735,000 Software Engineering Manager figure and a $348,831 page-level Software Engineer aggregate both appear in the same public dataset. Both rest on small or mixed samples and neither is used as a band anchor in this report.
• There is no evidence of a standard Executive Vice President tier. Assuming one from other companies would invent a layer Anduril does not appear to run.
• Chief Architect, Technical Director and Head of function titles appear in current postings at principal-equivalent scope, but no public source maps them onto the numeric ladder.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus Costa Mesa

Anduril publishes no city-level headcount, so this catalogue does not rank offices by employee count. Several evidenced locations are deliberately absent from the priced table because no public pay observation of any kind exists for them: Llanbedr in Wales, Dublin, Brussels, Tokyo and Okinawa, Taipei, Riyadh, and the emerging India presence represented by a remote Global Supply Chain Integration Lead role. Country benefit pages exist for the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, which confirms employment infrastructure in those markets without disclosing pay.

Costa Mesa anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• The Costa Mesa column is the anchor and represents the Greater Los Angeles market that contains the headquarters, Irvine and Long Beach. L5, L6 and L7 use the directly observed Greater Los Angeles slice; L3 and L4 use the national average because no Los Angeles slice is published at those levels.
• Seattle and Boston are the only other United States markets with a direct pay slice. Their factors are the mean of the level-by-level ratios against Greater Los Angeles, because the underlying samples are small and not internally monotonic: Boston L6 reads below Boston L5, and Seattle L6 reads below Seattle L5.
• United States sites without a pay observation are carried at the anchor rather than given an invented differential. Anduril advertises a single base range per role rather than a per-city ladder, so a national posting range is the best available evidence for those markets.
• Australia is priced as one national market across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, because no city-level Anduril observation exists. The factors run from 0.46 of the Costa Mesa base at the most junior band to 0.85 at the most senior, reflecting third-party estimates that rise from about A$105,000 for an associate engineer to A$190,000 to A$259,000 for a staff engineer.
• London is anchored on a directly observed median package of about £147,667, roughly $201,425, with a representative split near $135,000 base and $60,900 of annual stock. That maps to a 0.63 base and 0.62 total factor against Costa Mesa, applied flat because no level-by-level London series is published.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

• The formal plan legal name, board approval date, authorised share reserve, outstanding awards, utilisation rate, exercise-price formula and cap table are all absent from public sources. A private company has no obligation to publish any of them.
• A $61 billion preferred-round valuation cannot be turned into an employee per-share value without the fully diluted share count, the preferred and common rights stack, the current 409A common valuation and the individual grant terms. None of those is public.
• The July 2026 reports of financing discussions near $100 billion describe talks, not a completed transaction. Employee equity should be marked against the completed $61 billion round rather than the prospective figure.
• Because the stock is illiquid, the annualized equity values in this report are reported grant economics rather than realized cash. Vesting does not create liquidity at Anduril the way it does at a listed employer.

Private equity economics and what is missing

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The publicly observed schedule is a one-year cliff at 25 percent followed by roughly 2.08 percent a month through years two to four. Because refreshers reportedly overlap with the original grant, an employee past the cliff usually holds several partially vested grants at once, which is why annualized equity rather than a single grant value is the meaningful unit here.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Anduril job advertisements state that competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full-time offers. The word majority is doing real work: it is not a guarantee for every role, and no minimum eligible level is published.
• Observed annualized equity by level runs about $53,143 at L3, $102,025 at L4, $159,189 at L5, $166,750 at L6 and $255,137 at L7, implying mechanical four-year values of roughly $213,000 to $1.02 million if grants were flat and non-overlapping.
• Director, Vice President and Senior Vice President grant values are not reliably public at all. The postings say equity is included; nothing quantifies it, so those rows in this report are cash only.
• Employee reports consistently say recruiters have far more flexibility on equity than on base salary, which creates real dispersion between lateral hires and internal promotees at the same level.
• Equity value at Anduril carries mark risk that a listed employer does not have. A grant priced against a $61 billion round is worth something quite different if the next round reprices, and there is no daily market to check it against.

Indicative annual grant value by band — Costa Mesa

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm are co-founders in the chief executive and chief operating officer roles, Palmer Luckey is a co-founder without a chief executive title, and Christian Brose serves as chief strategy officer. Michael Galvin appears as a former chief financial officer and Andrea Lessard as a former Senior Vice President in the historical contractor record. The company also uses an Executive Chairman title. None of these individuals has a current compensation disclosure, and the historical figures cover different estimated years, which is why they cannot be summed or ranked as a single-year table.

Board compensation framework

Every board compensation field here is genuinely absent rather than estimated. A private company has no obligation to publish director pay, and inventing a retainer from listed-company norms would be the single easiest way to mislead a reader of this report.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Employee discussion through 2026 describes an annual performance review carrying both base increases and equity refreshers, with mid-year review activity focused more on promotions. Rough employee-reported markers cluster around 5 percent for meets, 6 percent for exceeds, 7 percent for exceptional and about 10 percent on promotion, with substantial variation. These are anecdotal figures from anonymous forums, not an Anduril policy document, and they should be read as a shape rather than a schedule.

Dataset summary

City-level H-1B wage history

All-years aggregates. P25/P75 are rounded reconstruction values marked modeled; medians and record counts are the stronger fields.

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1The bundle contains one research report and one structured data file rather than several independent bundles, so there is no cross-bundle disagreement to reconcile on the band figures. Where the two disagree, the narrative report is preferred because its figures are traceable to a named source.
2. 2The structured data file carries a $2.2 billion FY2025 revenue figure that the narrative report neither states nor sources. It is recorded here as unverified and is not used in any metric or calculation.
3. 3United States city slices are small and not internally monotonic. Boston L6 reads below Boston L5 and Seattle L6 reads below Seattle L5 in the raw data. The Seattle and Boston factors are the mean of the level ratios rather than a level-by-level series, and a reader should not infer that Boston pays a staff engineer less than a lead engineer.
4. 4L3 and L4 use national averages while L5, L6 and L7 use the Greater Los Angeles slice, because no Los Angeles observation exists at the two junior levels. That mixes two sampling frames inside one anchor column, and it is flagged on each band row.
5. 5The Australian factors are built from low-confidence third-party estimates rather than Anduril observations, and the linear interpolation from 0.46 at the most junior band to 0.85 at the most senior slightly understates the mid-ladder observations, where a staff-level estimate implies about 0.72 against a modeled 0.62.
6. 6Melbourne and Canberra carry the Sydney factors because no city-level Australian observation exists for either. They are shown as one national market rather than given invented city differentials.
7. 7London uses a flat factor because the only public London evidence is an all-level median package. There is no level-by-level London series to support a compression curve, so no baseFactorTop is set.
8. 8Director, senior director and vice president rows are cash only. Anduril states that equity is included in the majority of full-time offers but never quantifies it at those levels, so those totals understate the real packages by an unknown amount and are excluded from the range chart.
9. 9L8 and senior vice president rows carry no figures at all. Interpolating them from adjacent levels would have produced plausible numbers with no evidence behind them.
10. 10No employer benefit load is included anywhere in this report. Superannuation, pension, medical premiums and payroll taxes are employer cost rather than pay, and adding them would inflate the Australian and United Kingdom columns against the anchor.
11. 11Anduril discloses no geographic revenue split, so no regional revenue panel is shown and none is reconstructed from the funding or contract record.
12. 12Several evidenced locations are absent from the priced table entirely because they have no public pay observation of any kind: Llanbedr in Wales, Dublin, Brussels, Tokyo, Okinawa, Taipei, Riyadh and the emerging India presence. Singapore was checked and no significant current Anduril location was evidenced in the reviewed open-role list.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-25

Single-date conversion layer for comparability; it ignores payroll-date FX, tax, purchasing power, benefits valuation and hedging. Compensation intelligence, not legal, tax, investment, immigration or employment advice.

Source register — 13 sources

Anduril publishes no annual headcount series, so this panel is a set of dated workforce signals rather than a fiscal-year trend. The two Australian figures are programme and country subsets and must not be read as company-wide points on the same curve. The one company-wide figure, 7,000 employees across 35 locations in January 2026, comes from a state government release rather than from Anduril.