BELLEVUE, Wash. — There is no prominent signage outside Anduril’s downtown Bellevue office. The name isn’t listed in the building directory, on the suite door, or in the lobby. That may be by design: Inside, Anduril engineers are quietly building AI-driven, autonomous technologies intended to keep the U.S. and its allies ahead in a rapidly changing military landscape.

Step through the front doors and it becomes clear that this is no ordinary tech company. 

Scattered across desks, production tables, conference rooms and showroom labs are autonomous drones ranging in size from a microwave to a ping-pong table, alongside next-generation digital night-vision goggles and military-grade edge computers designed to keep soldiers connected in an increasingly data-rich battlefield. 

The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based defense giant — which closed a $5 billion funding round at a $61 billion valuation earlier this year and is reportedly targeting a $100 billion valuation — is rapidly building a massive engineering footprint in the greater Seattle region. It includes modern offices in downtown Bellevue and Seattle, and a multi-acre military testing facility near Carnation, Wash.

GeekWire got a peek inside the iconoclastic company’s Seattle-area operations this week. We toured the Bellevue offices, demoed products, and sat down with senior vice president Tom Keane. The former Microsoft cloud executive leads Anduril’s local presence and oversees its connected warfare division, including mixed reality, AI and edge computing technologies.

Keane was clear about the company’s growth ambitions in the Seattle region: “I could absolutely see a world where we get to 1,000 people here in terms of engineers,” he said.

Asked when that milestone could be reached, Keane said, “It’s sort of almost as fast as you can hire people.” Realistically, that will likely occur over the next two years.

Anduril currently employs 560 people in its Bellevue and downtown Seattle offices, up from about 30 four years ago. That’s when Keane, who had interviewed with 62 companies looking for a new challenge in edge computing, joined Anduril because of what he called “world-class teams in every discipline.” 

With more than 110 open positions in Washington state and a newly leased third floor in downtown Seattle coming online, Keane said the regional expansion is only accelerating.

The regional workforce was until recently slated to include a maritime manufacturing hub along the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. However, as GeekWire reported this morning, Anduril has since vacated the former Foss Maritime shipyard space after the U.S. Navy canceled the autonomous warship program the company was pursuing.

But Anduril’s maritime ambitions haven’t gone away. Alongside its autonomous aircraft, low-cost cruise missiles and counter-drone interceptors, the company continues to develop a large subsea fleet, from modular survey vehicles to the extra-large, school-bus-sized Dive-XL.

The Big Tech pipeline meets ‘grit’

The company’s Seattle-area ramp-up is a play for the region’s engineering talent — a mix of disciplines well-suited to a next-generation defense hardware company, and one Keane says is hard to find in one place. That includes distributed systems engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, and advanced optics experts.

Another advantage: proximity to major military installations including Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Naval Base Kitsap.

Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta have long dominated local engineering hiring. But Anduril is recruiting aggressively from those companies, pitching engineers who want to move fast and see their work in the field.

Deep pockets and close ties to the U.S. defense establishment don’t hurt, either.

Anduril got a large infusion of that talent 18 months ago, when it took over Microsoft’s IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) program along with about 100 local engineers who had spent years developing augmented reality hardware for the U.S. Army.

“If you take machine learning and AI… you can look out any of these windows and see places that we can recruit from,” Keane said from a conference room overlooking downtown Bellevue. “For a lot of software engineers, this is incredibly applied.”

Keane acknowledges the company’s culture isn’t for everyone. In fact, Anduril got plenty of buzz last year with its edgy recruiting campaign, “Don’t Work at Anduril.“

Rather than plush tech perks and work-from-home flexibility, Anduril pitches what Keane calls “grit” — a willingness to take ownership of hard engineering problems and test them in the field. It’s very much an in-office culture, in part because the company builds hardware.

Anduril also moves fast, an approach Hawaiian-shirt-wearing founder Palmer Luckey wields against slower traditional military contractors.

The company’s “grit” translates directly into how Anduril tests its gear.

In rural Carnation, Wash., about 20 miles east of Bellevue, Anduril operates a testing range with a built-out “shoot house” for low-light tactical work. It gives engineers a place to iterate on code and hardware in the mud and rain alongside active-duty warfighters.

Among them: members of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment from nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord, who recently put Anduril’s EagleEye mixed-reality system through its paces on the firing range and obstacle course.

Hands-On with ‘EagleEye’ and Lattice

During a walkthrough of the Bellevue facility, Anduril’s team showed us a wide range of hardware being designed, tested, and calibrated on site.

The centerpiece was EagleEye, the company’s heads-up hardware and software suite built for warfighters. Historically, soldiers have had to lug 3 to 5 pounds of glass and electronics on their helmets, paired with fragmented radios, specialized batteries and thick cables.

Anduril’s system strips that down to a 115-gram pair of augmented reality glasses — about four ounces — built in collaboration with Meta (for waveguides), Canon (for sensors), Qualcomm (for custom silicon) and Oakley (for ballistic protection).

I tried on the lightweight camouflage backpack and glasses — no helmet in this case — in a demo in the Bellevue testing lab. It ran through three operational “vignettes” driven by Anduril’s core Lattice software:

• Tactical HUD: A heads-up display projecting friendly force markers, compass headings, and mini-maps into the user’s field of view so troops don’t have to look down at a handheld screen while moving.
• Threat Detection: Real-time alerts from external AI sensors — such as a tower camera or an overhead drone — highlighting incoming aerial threats directly in the display.
• Command & Control (C2): The ability to assign tasks to autonomous technology. Using a small handheld controller, an operator can send a virtual Ghost drone to a location, pull up a live video feed and execute a simulated strike.

In each case, the user controls the system — navigating between maps and text — with a click of a button on a small device connected to the front of the backpack.

The team also previewed its upcoming digital night vision system. Instead of the narrow “toilet paper roll” view of traditional analog goggles, Anduril’s VR-style digital displays offer an 84-degree field of view. That’s more than double the 40 degrees warfighters get in devices today.

Using machine learning models, the system fuses thermal imagery and low-light camera feeds in real time, making heat signatures leap out in pitch-black environments.

To ensure every pixel lands accurately without causing motion sickness, Anduril’s engineers use custom robotic arms to run geometric calibration on each lens distortion map before it leaves the facility. An engineer running the testing equipment politely asked GeekWire not to photograph the system.

The night vision system has not yet been deployed but will be part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command prototype delivery to the U.S. Army next year, said Stephanie Davis, communications manager for Anduril’s connected warfare group.

Protests, hiring and hardware

Operating a high-profile defense company in the Seattle area doesn’t come without friction. Activist groups recently staged protests outside Anduril’s downtown Seattle offices, targeting the company’s autonomous weapons development and military contracts.

At the time, Anduril issued a statement to GeekWire saying that it respects the right to free speech.  “That said, it is perplexing when people choose to protest a company dedicated to supporting the very military that safeguards those rights,” the company added.

When asked about the pushback, Keane said critics don’t affect Anduril’s hiring. “There’s protests at every company, frankly.”

Anduril’s hiring reaches well beyond Big Tech. Drew Swanson, a lead architect, spent 13 years in the military working in communications supporting special operations units in the field. He described an Anduril technology called Squad-A, which helps squad leaders pick the best network connections to stitch together incoming intelligence feeds.

Swanson said the draw of Anduril is the chance to escape corporate bureaucracy and tackle high-stakes physical problems, reflected in comments he gets from others in Seattle tech.

“One of the biggest things that I always hear is: ‘I want to come over there because you guys are going after really hard problems,'” Swanson said of conversations with tech colleagues around Seattle.

Solving those problems often comes down to fundamental hardware redesigns, like combining a soldier’s ballistic vest, battery and edge computing device into a single body plate. Keane showed off a prototype as the tour wrapped up — an example of Anduril’s broader approach.

“Batteries are such a huge thing,” he said, pointing to the body armor. “If you put the three of them together… you can start to get rid of stuff. You take what was historically three separate heavy things and turn it into one software-enabled platform.”

TikTok is laying off 75 workers in the Seattle region, focused largely on the company’s e-commerce business, according to a notice filed Tuesday with Washington state.

Job titles listed in the notice are almost entirely TikTok Shop and Global E-Commerce roles in Bellevue, Wash., including anti-fraud and governance program managers, seller and creator operations staff, campaign managers, data scientists, and backend and frontend engineers.

It’s part of a steady stream of tech layoffs this year. Zillow cut more than 500 jobs this month, including 91 in Washington state. Microsoft eliminated 605 positions in the state in July as part of a broader reduction of 4,800. Google cut 52 jobs and Salesforce cut 59 locally this month.

The notice Tuesday was filed by TT Commerce & Global Services LLC on TikTok letterhead, and lists two ByteDance employees as contacts. It gives the affected facility as Lincoln Square North at 700 Bellevue Way NE, with a separation date of Oct. 19.

TikTok Shop is the company’s in-app shopping business, which lets brands and creators sell products directly in TikTok videos and livestreams. The company has used the Seattle region as a base for the e-commerce push, expanding its Bellevue offices as it built out the business.

GeekWire has contacted TikTok representatives for comment, and asked for details on the size of the company’s remaining workforce in Bellevue and the Seattle region.

The cuts follow TikTok’s announcement on Aug. 6 that it will close its Nashville office and lay off all 250 workers there, most of them on content moderation teams.

The company last year cut 65 Seattle-area jobs, including 38 at TikTok and 27 at ByteDance.

Five months after OpenAI cut the ribbon on its office in Bellevue, Wash., the building has become the target of a national campaign against AI expansion, which made its Seattle-area stop on Friday with balloons, whistles and rogue “AI agents” in hot pink vests.

In what one X user described as possibly “the most unserious protest of all time,” some members of the group entered the City Center Plaza lobby with a chorus of “Happy Rogue Day to OpenAI,” dancing around and generally coming off like members of a community acting troupe.

The “Happy Rogue Day” song was a reference to an incident last month, when two OpenAI models escaped a closed testing environment and reportedly carried out some 17,600 hacking actions on the open internet over four days, ultimately breaching the AI developer platform Hugging Face.

The New York Post called the Bellevue protest “cringeworthy,” but the very fact that it got national coverage was a win for the protesters, drawing attention to their concerns over data centers, energy use, and an AI race they say is accelerating beyond anyone’s control.

This might be the most unserious protest of all time pic.twitter.com/koP03RAhWw

— JJ (@jjtwofive) August 15, 2026

Organizers said the protest was part of “Dump Big Tech” actions taking place this month in more than 20 states, with much of the energy directed at data center expansion. Earlier in the week, 13 student protesters were arrested occupying OpenAI’s lobbying office in Washington, D.C.

We’ve contacted OpenAI for comment on the Bellevue protest.

The action was organized by the Oil & Gas Action Network, Troublemakers Community, Washington AI Resistance, Salish Sea Action Collective, and QuitGPT.

The Bellevue office is OpenAI’s largest outside its San Francisco headquarters, with about 250 employees in the region when it opened in March. It occupies two floors with the ability to add 10 more, under a lease covering nearly 300,000 square feet, room for as many as 1,400 people.

Bellevue has actively courted AI companies, with xAI, Crusoe, and others expanding downtown, and Mayor Mo Malakoutian calling OpenAI’s arrival a vote of confidence in the city.

One of the Seattle region’s most notable tech startups is moving its headquarters to Texas.

Supply chain technology startup Auger will maintain a major engineering office in Bellevue, Wash., where it got started. But the company’s co-founder and CEO, Dave Clark, the former Amazon operations chief, is officially back in Dallas, and he took the company’s HQ with him.

Founded in 2024, Auger has raised $150 million, including a $50 million Series B round led by Eclipse in July. Its software connects the systems that companies use to run their supply chains, integrating AI to help automate them. Its customers include Meta, Fanatics and Kimberly-Clark.

Clark, in an interview with GeekWire, said the move is about talent and family, not taxes. For one thing, Texas happens to better suit him and Auger co-founder Leigh Anne Clark, his wife. They’re running toward something rather than away, he said. They both grew up in the Southeast, and they had always intended to return to Texas at some point.

“I’d rather have a really hot month of August than a really gray month of February,” he said.

Dallas is also a place where you run into supply chain specialists at the coffee shop like you do software engineers in Seattle, he said. That’s a key talent pool for Auger at this stage in its evolution. Another bonus: Texas is more central to corporate customers across the country.

The magazine D CEO in Dallas, which first reported the news of Auger’s HQ relocation this week, noted that the company did not seek state or local incentives as part of the move.

Clark confirmed in the GeekWire interview Tuesday that taxes weren’t a factor, noting that he couldn’t even quantify what the tax advantages would be. However, he said, “There’s a lot I like about the way the state of Texas manages and works with business.”

When asked what he would say to people in Seattle who might see another warning sign in a startup like Auger moving its HQ somewhere else, he didn’t shoot down the premise.

“If you’re in that position, I think you’re right to be worried, in the sense that there’s a lot of discussion about things in the state of Washington and Seattle that are not particularly friendly to business,” he said.

Washington state lawmakers approved a “millionaires tax” this year, a 9.9% levy on personal income above $1 million. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson drew criticism from some in tech after saying of wealthy residents who leave the state, “like, bye.”

Clark didn’t point to any particular policy or issue but said he has sensed an “anti-business” sentiment that concerns him since moving back to the Seattle area from Texas to launch Auger.

“Seattle should just be careful,” he said. “It’s not preordained that they win these things. It’s not preordained that these big companies stay in town.”

The Pacific Northwest has enormous resources to compete globally, he added, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be “a phenomenal draw to anybody and everybody coming in.”

The region has “many, many strengths, and we should leverage them to the advantage of the community,” he said. “And sometimes I think the rhetoric gets in the way of it.”

Auger has about 115 people in Bellevue — engineers and supply chain data scientists — and Clark said he expects that office to grow 20% to 30% over the next year or two. He and Leigh Anne will both be back there regularly, he said, working alongside the team.

“Nothing’s changing there,” he said.

The company’s new HQ in North Dallas occupies part of the 15th floor of One Galleria Tower, centrally located between neighborhoods north and south of the city, with a quick run to DFW International Airport, as Clark pointed out in the D CEO article.

The office currently has about 15 people, most hired in recent months for sales, go-to-market and supply chain roles. Many of them had been traveling to Bellevue until the new space opened. Clark expects to add another 20 to 30 people in Dallas by the middle of next year.

As in Bellevue, where Auger subleased its space from Microsoft and bought the furniture for $1, the Dallas office came furnished. This time the furniture cost $10. (There goes Texas’ reputation for affordability.)

“It cost me 10 times more for the furniture in Dallas,” Clark joked. “I like nice things, cheap.”

Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead its global operations and later its worldwide consumer business, and was one of the chief architects of the logistics network behind the company’s delivery operation. He left in 2022 to become CEO of Flexport, departing the freight startup the following year, before starting Auger.

Leigh Anne Clark is Auger’s president of fashion and beauty, leading the company’s work in an industry known for waste-prone supply chains. The couple, who met in Kentucky in 2000 while Dave Clark was at Amazon, have two sons, ages 14 and 11.

With its rapid hiring and significant early funding rounds, Auger rose quickly to No. 31 on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of Pacific Northwest tech startups. Because the GeekWire 200 is limited to companies based in the region, the headquarters move puts Auger’s standing in jeopardy.

Informed of this predicament, Clark made his pitch to stay on. “We still have a lot of dev there,” he said of the Bellevue office. “I think you get grandfathered into the list in some way, right?”

Meanwhile, the business keeps growing. Clark said Auger signed two major contracts Tuesday with customers he declined to name. The Bellevue office marked them with a bell-ringing, and the two offices celebrated together over a video call. A second bell is on order for Dallas.

“We’ll have dual bells that we’ll ring together,” Clark said.

Stepping off the light rail in downtown Bellevue, Wash., is about to come with a free ride.

Visit Bellevue announced this week that it’s launching a free electric shuttle pilot program on Aug. 3 to help riders on Sound Transit’s 2 line continue their journey to other downtown destinations.

The new service is funded by Amazon and Visit Bellevue in partnership with Circuit, the City of Bellevue and Sound Transit. The pilot will run through December as an extension of the BellHop program, an on-demand electric shuttle service that started in the city in 2023.

The shuttle program will service riders at Bellevue’s downtown light rail station with two Volkswagen ID. BUZZ electric vans. Passengers can board at a designated pickup spot and request a drop-off location within the roughly 4-mile service area — no reservation or mobile app is required.

Riders looking to return to the light rail station can use the BellHop service by booking an on-demand ride via the Ride Circuit app.

Amazon employs roughly 14,000 corporate workers in Bellevue. The opening this spring of the Link light rail Crosslake Connection across Lake Washington was viewed as a vital new transportation option for tech workers commuting between Seattle and Eastside campuses.

“We see tremendous value in programs that improve access to public transit, support sustainable mobility, and connect people with local businesses and destinations,” Keri Pravitz, manager of Community Engagement for Amazon in Bellevue, said in a statement.

The new shuttle will operate Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. See a map of the service area below.