Shield AI

Shield AI

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration – Expeditionary (R5193)

Washington, DC · Staff+ · Part-time

No sponsorship$234k-$351kDetected 15 hours ago
C++LinuxRecruitingLeadershipCommunicationMentoring

About the role

  • Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively
  • supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

Responsibilities

  • Technical Strategy & Portfolio Leadership - Define and drive the long-term technical direction for Expeditionary autonomy across V-BAT, X-BAT, and future platforms.
  • Develop & Field Autonomy - Guide development of mission autonomy, payload integration, flight-autonomy interfaces, executive autonomy, and multi-agent capabilities while ensuring successful operational deployment.
  • Design & Engineering Excellence - Lead architecture reviews, engineering standards, interface definitions, and organization-wide technical improvements.
  • Mentorship & Organizational Growth - Mentor senior engineers, develop technical leaders, contribute to leveling frameworks, and partner on senior hiring.
  • Continuous Improvement - Drive long-term improvements to engineering processes, integration workflows, testing infrastructure, and developer experience.
  • Hiring & Developing Technical Talent - Define the technical hiring bar for senior engineering roles, partner with engineering managers on long-term staffing strategy, and help grow the organization's technical capabilities.
  • With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively supports operations worldwide.
  • The Autonomous Pilot Integration team for expeditionary platforms builds autonomy solutions for V-BAT - an unmanned aircraft operating in expeditionary environments for ISR, target acquisition, communications, and multi-agent missions.
  • The team also builds autonomy for X-BAT, a new platform under development by the aircraft team; for X-BAT, the team builds on top of the existing mission autonomy solution from the Strategic Systems (ACP) portfolio and works closely with the aircraft team on the flight-autonomy interface.
  • In this role, you'll own the technical direction for the Expeditionary portfolio, driving the evolution of autonomy architecture across V-BAT and X-BAT while ensuring scalable, mission-ready solutions that support current operators and future platforms.

Requirements

  • BS/MS in a relevant engineering discipline or equivalent experience.
  • 10+ years of relevant experience.
  • Expert-level C++ and Linux systems development experience.
  • Demonstrated experience defining technical strategy across multiple engineering teams or programs.
  • Proven track record influencing architecture and solving highly complex systems integration challenges.
  • Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving engineering excellence.
  • Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

  • Extensive experience with Group 3 UAS, VTOL platforms, or comparable autonomous systems.
  • Experience defining flight-autonomy interfaces or custom autopilot integrations.
  • Experience deploying autonomy to operational military systems.
  • Experience with STANAG 4586, UCI, OMS, and open-systems architectures.
  • Experience shaping engineering practices across an organization.
  • Full-time regular employee offer package:
  • Temporary employee offer package:
  • All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.

Compensation

  • Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location.

Benefits

  • Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Company info

  • Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
  • We combine capabilities from the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team (e.g., ViDAR, ATR), and the HivemindSDK to develop the autonomy software that runs on these platforms, then integrate, validate, and field it on the real hardware - for U.S. and international defense customers.
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This listing is sourced directly from Shield AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.