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Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead autonomy integration efforts for its Hivemind autonomy software and autonomous aircraft platforms (V-BAT, X-BAT). This is a technical leadership role focused on building and maintaining stable integrated implementations of the autonomy stack across perception, localization, and planning components.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and maintain Pilot integrated implementations, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and end-to-end examples that serve as the foundation for the autonomy platform
- Partner with component teams to integrate new capabilities into the shared integration environment, maintain baseline stability, and resolve gaps in workflows and extensibility
- Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components
- Develop and maintain the glue layer between mission autonomy software and platform software for seamless integration and deployment
- Investigate failures across system boundaries, reproduce issues, isolate root causes, and coordinate fixes across teams
- Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including configuration, telemetry, and field debugging
- Collaborate with Flight Operations to define test objectives, prepare integrated software, assess readiness, and analyze integration failures
- Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples; contribute to Pilot training materials
- Drive strategy for diverse autonomy reference integrations supporting various representative missions
- Develop workflows and tooling for seamless deployment of autonomy software on edge devices
- Create documentation to help users build custom autonomy integrations
This role requires deep expertise in autonomous systems integration, strong C++ and Python skills, and the ability to work across multiple technical domains. You will be a key technical authority on the integration layer, guiding architecture decisions and mentoring other engineers.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent practical experience
- Demonstrated professional experience building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for perception, planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or related algorithmic domains
- Strong modern C++ skills, including safe concurrency patterns and ability to diagnose data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors
- Working experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, maintainable design
- Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux
- Practical experience with build/dependency management systems (Conan, Nix, or similar)
Preferred qualifications:
- Master's degree in AI, Computer Science, Robotics, or similar field
- Breadth of experience across the autonomy stack (perception, localization, planning)
- Experience with multi-agent autonomy systems
- Experience applying VLMs or VLAs to planning, reasoning, tool use, or autonomous decision-making
- Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained autonomous systems
- Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop simulation, performance profiling, or distributed systems
