Joe Chen

Joe Chen is a co-founder of Anduril , the member of the founding team who brought hands-on hardware engineering to a company that needed to build physical machines, not just software. Of the five founders he is the least public, but his background sits at the intersection of consumer-hardware product development and military service.

Chen studied electrical engineering at Rice University and later earned an MBA from the University of Southern California. His most direct tie to the rest of the founding group came through Oculus VR, Palmer Luckey’s virtual-reality company, where Chen was one of the first employees. There he worked on hardware as a product lead and ran non-gaming developer relations, and after Facebook’s acquisition he kept working on VR content and new camera-capture techniques — the kind of sensor and optics work that maps closely onto the perception problems autonomous weapons have to solve.

He also took an unusual step for a Silicon Valley engineer: he enlisted in the US Army National Guard, serving as a paratrooper in the 1-143rd Infantry Battalion (Airborne). That service gives Anduril’s founding team a direct connection to the soldiers it says it builds for, rather than viewing the battlefield only through contracts and requirements documents.

When Luckey, Trae Stephens, Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm started Anduril in 2017, Chen joined as the founding engineer, helping shape the company’s hardware and product organisation in its early years. Public detail on his current role is thin — Anduril has always pushed Luckey and Schimpf forward as its faces — but his fingerprints are on the engineering culture that lets the company design and manufacture its own drones, sensors and counter-drone systems.