Landing a high-paying job right now can feel less like climbing a ladder and more like surviving a gauntlet—especially for Gen Z. Competition for entry-level roles is fierce, and generative AI has made it easier than ever to polish résumés and cover letters, making it harder for candidates to stand out on paper alone.
Anduril, a $30 billion defense tech startup, is approaching hiring with a radically different approach: Don’t tell us what you can do—fly it.
The company is launching an “AI Grand Prix”—an open-invitation event starting this spring for the world’s top engineers to prove their coding skills in a high-speed drone racing competition. The twist: Humans won’t be piloting, but their autonomous software will be. The competition is open to individuals, university teams, and research organizations. No professional credentials or certifications are required. The only prerequisite? A passion for AI programming.
The top 10 teams will split a $500,000 prize pool, while the highest-scoring participant could “win a job”—meaning they can skip Anduril’s usual recruiting process to interview directly with hiring managers for open roles.
“This is an open challenge,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, who conceived the idea, said in a press release. “If you think you can build an autonomy stack that can out-fly the world’s best, show us.”
The competition will begin with two virtual qualification phases between April and June, when teams submit custom Python-based AI algorithms and compete on a simulated racecourse. Top performers will advance to a two-week, in-person training and qualification program in Southern California this September. The series will culminate with the “AI Grand Prix” in Ohio, where finalists will race for the $500,000 prize pool—and a potential job at the startup.
Anduril didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Anduril’s Palmer Luckey bets on builders—not on degrees
The company’s founder is best known in Silicon Valley for his early work in virtual reality. Luckey’s first company, Oculus, was acquired by Meta in 2014 for about $2 billion. After departing the company, Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, building it into a major defense technology firm focused on autonomous systems designed to support U.S. forces and its allies.
But as Anduril has ballooned to 7,000 employees, Luckey has said he looks less for candidates who have walked the beaten path—and instead seeks those who are willing to try something new.
“When I hire people at Anduril, I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do,” Luckey said on the Shawn Ryan Show last year. “Because that means they’re the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time because they want to bring something to this world that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.”
His advice to aspiring engineers is straightforward: Don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do. “Work on projects that you care about,” he said.
Employers are getting more creative in seeking top talent
Anduril is not alone in rethinking how to identify top performers.
A growing number of startups are bucking tradition and turning to skills-based challenges as an alternative way to test engineering candidates—from virtual “capture the flag” cybersecurity competitions to digital scavenger hunts.
Tech giant Palantir took the idea even further last year with its Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month paid internship for recent high school graduates who have mixed feelings about the university experience. The program combines technical work alongside full-time employees with seminars on U.S. history and the foundations of Western civilization. Participants who excel are given the opportunity to interview for full-time roles at the company.
The initiative also reflects CEO Alex Karp’s long-standing disdain for higher education. The fellowship was marketed as a way to “get the Palantir degree” and “skip the debt [and] … indoctrination.”
“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp told CNBC last year.
The broader shift toward skills-based hiring has been spreading across industries. In fact, about 90% of chief human resources officers say their organizations have an increasing need to hire workers without a four-year degree, according to a survey released last year.
“This is not about replacing degrees,” Michelle Froah, global chief marketing and innovation officer at educational testing company ETS, told Fortune last year. “It’s about balancing them with real, demonstrable skills that keep people employable and businesses competitive.”
