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Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is seeking a Principal Engineer to own the platform architecture for its mission-critical edge applications and command & control systems. This is a Staff/Principal-level individual contributor role with significant technical leadership scope across multiple teams and organizational boundaries.
You will define and evolve the architecture spanning operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces, and edge deployment environments. Key responsibilities include:
• Establish platform architecture boundaries that enable independent team delivery while maintaining product coherence, scaling from single-vehicle ground control station (GCS) workflows to multi-vehicle supervision, heterogeneous fleet operations, and theater-level planning and battlespace management.
• Make customer extensibility a core platform capability by designing APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, and integration tooling that allow customers and partners to rapidly add platforms, data sources, applications, and workflows while preserving compatibility.
• Lead command & control (C2) and battle-management system (BMS) interoperability, guiding integration with external mission systems and defense C2 environments to enable aggregation and exchange of vehicle state, mission information, sensor data, and operational context.
• Advance operator and agentic workflows by partnering with autonomy, AI, product, and design teams to deliver intuitive planning, supervision, execution, and debrief experiences. Define operator authority, approval boundaries, observability, and evaluation criteria for AI-assisted workflows.
• Own fleet and configuration architecture, establishing capabilities for asset inventory, readiness monitoring, software versioning, compatibility management, controlled updates, rollback, and traceability across deployed autonomous systems.
• Engineer for edge applications in contested environments, designing for intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, distributed state, and recovery from partial failures.
• Drive the technical roadmap and execution by translating product strategy, customer needs, and operational feedback into architectural priorities, milestones, and measurable deliverables. Resolve dependencies and make explicit tradeoffs among delivery speed, platform investment, reliability, and technical debt.
• Lead products through customer deployment, partnering with integration, test, field, and customer teams from requirements through acceptance, deployment, and sustainment. Use field experience, telemetry, and customer feedback to improve subsequent releases.
Shield AI's products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies, with operations worldwide across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent record of technical depth and impact, including substantial responsibility for complex production systems.
• 5+ years providing technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent, with demonstrated influence across multiple teams and ownership of significant architectural decisions.
• Deep experience developing defense GCS and C2 applications, with working knowledge of mission planning, mission execution, operator workflows, and integration with broader battle-management environments.
• Demonstrated record of shipping and sustaining software products for defense customers, including responsibility for operational deployment, customer acceptance, and improvements informed by field use.
• Strong software architecture and implementation skills across distributed systems, application services, APIs, data management, and operator-facing software.
• Experience building extensible platforms used by multiple teams and external customers, including interface design, reusable capabilities, versioning, and integration across organizational boundaries.
• Experience with autonomous robotics applications, including fleet operations, configuration management, telemetry, and interactions between ground applications and platform-side autonomy.
• Strong understanding of networked systems and edge deployments, including performance, reliability, security, and behavior under limited or interrupted connectivity.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous customer and stakeholder needs into technical roadmaps, executable plans, and delivered capabilities; excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
PREFERRED:
• Direct experience developing or integrating platforms such as Lattice, other extensible defense C2/BMS products, or comparable mission-management systems.
• Experience with multi-domain operations, heterogeneous autonomous fleets, and the relationship between tactical GCS applications and higher-echelon mission systems.
• Experience delivering agentic or AI-assisted applications, including workflow orchestration, human-machine teaming, evaluation, and operator supervision.
• Experience with geospatial applications, common operational pictures, mission rehearsal, telemetry replay, or post-mission analysis.
• Experience with secure software delivery into defense environments, including collaboration with cybersecurity and authorization teams.
