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Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer for Mission Systems Software to architect and lead the development of safety- and mission-critical real-time software systems for autonomous aircraft and defense platforms. This is a technical leadership role focused on end-to-end software architecture spanning mission applications, platform services, middleware, OS interfaces, hardware abstraction layers, networking, and data distribution.
Key responsibilities include defining system architecture with deterministic real-time performance characteristics, addressing scheduling, latency, jitter, synchronization, and resource allocation across CPU/GPU/accelerator platforms. You will develop architecture views, interface definitions, data-flow and deployment models, sequence diagrams, resource budgets, and technical decision records. The role requires integrating sensors, effectors, communications, navigation, autonomy, mission management, command-and-control, and vehicle services in collaboration with hardware, FPGA, cybersecurity, safety, systems, and test teams.
You will design for mission resilience through fault detection, redundancy, graceful degradation, recovery, health monitoring, cybersecurity, and airworthiness certification. You'll establish engineering practices for concurrency, synchronization, memory management, deterministic execution, and predictable component integration. The position includes defining and executing verification strategies across HIL/SIL labs, simulations, flight-test environments, and deployed systems using automated, performance, stress, and fault-injection testing.
Required: Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field; 8+ years professional software engineering with 3+ years in software or systems architecture; experience with embedded, distributed, real-time, safety-critical systems; proficiency in C, C++, Rust, or similar systems languages; strong real-time software principles knowledge; experience with RTOSs, middleware, IPC, networking, and data distribution; ability to define architectures, APIs, ICDs, and resource budgets; hardware integration experience; full lifecycle software support; systems engineering process knowledge; performance analysis skills; cross-functional technical leadership; and ability to obtain DoD security clearance (U.S. citizenship may be required).
Preferred: autonomous aircraft, UAS, avionics, or aerospace/defense software experience; familiarity with A-GRA, AMS-GRA, OMS, UCI, FACE standards; autonomy and mission management integration; airworthiness and certification standards (DO-178C, DO-254, ARP4754A); heterogeneous computing architectures; publish/subscribe middleware; cybersecurity controls design; HIL/SIL and flight-test experience; and supplier design evaluation.
