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Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is seeking a Senior or Staff Software Engineer to join the Hivemind Developer Experience Engineering team. Hivemind is an autonomy software platform that powers intelligent systems protecting service members and civilians.
The Developer Experience team owns the tools, platforms, and practices that shape how engineers build software for Hivemind. This includes local development environments, devcontainers, internal developer platforms, project templates, and approaches enabling co-development and inner-source collaboration across engineering teams.
In this hands-on engineering role with broad organizational impact, you will design, build, and operate tools and platforms that improve the end-to-end developer experience. You will advance local development workflows, devcontainers, internal developer platforms, and reusable engineering capabilities. A near-term focus is bringing agentic AI capabilities into developer tools and workflows in ways that deliver meaningful, measurable value to engineers.
You will partner directly with developers to identify recurring sources of friction, turn ambiguous needs into durable solutions, and drive adoption through documentation, advocacy, and close collaboration. You will care deeply about engineering productivity and use signals such as DORA metrics and developer feedback to guide priorities and measure outcomes. You will own solutions through discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement. At the Staff level, you would lead cross-team initiatives, establish longer-term technical direction, and influence how Hivemind approaches developer productivity at organizational scale.
This position may be filled at the Senior or Staff level based on the candidate's experience, demonstrated technical leadership, and scope of impact.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 4+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience
- Demonstrated technical judgment in the design and operation of developer tools, platforms, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, or related production software
- Experience owning software from initial design through deployment, operation, adoption, and continuous improvement
- Systems thinking and the ability to turn recurring or ambiguous developer needs into coherent, reusable solutions
- Strong customer orientation toward internal developers and an interest in understanding and improving how engineering work gets done
- Effective collaboration and communication across engineering teams and organizational stakeholders
- Ability to advocate for new tools and practices, incorporate feedback, and build adoption through influence
- Experience with AWS and cloud-native development practices
- Experience with Git, GitLab, Backstage, or similar developer-platform technologies
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- For Staff-level consideration, a demonstrated record of leading technically complex, cross-team initiatives and shaping technical direction beyond an immediate team
- Experience building or operating internal developer platforms, developer portals, development environments, or reusable engineering frameworks
- Experience applying AI or agentic systems to software development tools and workflows
- Proficiency in one or more relevant languages, such as Python, Go, JavaScript, or TypeScript/Node.js
- Experience with devcontainers, project scaffolding, service templates, or standardized local development environments
- Experience enabling inner-source development or contribution across team boundaries
- Familiarity with DORA metrics, developer productivity measurement, and qualitative developer-experience research
