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Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the design and implementation of the AI Factory Reference Architecture, a Kubernetes-native platform for developing, training, evaluating, and deploying next-generation AI systems for defense applications.
The AI Factory serves dual purposes: internally, it powers autonomy development across Hivemind and other AI programs; externally, it becomes the reference architecture deployed into customer environments spanning commercial cloud, on-premise infrastructure, sovereign deployments, and fully air-gapped systems.
In this role, you will partner closely with ML researchers, platform engineers, and autonomy teams to deliver an exceptional developer experience for training and deploying modern AI models. You will work hands-on across the full stack, helping shape both the platform architecture and its implementation while staying closely aligned with the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.
Success requires balancing researcher productivity, platform simplicity, operational excellence, and long-term maintainability. You will influence technical direction at a company-wide scope, mentoring engineers and establishing best practices for ML infrastructure. This is a high-impact opportunity to build foundational infrastructure that directly supports Shield AI's mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. The company develops autonomy software (Hivemind), autonomous aircraft (V-BAT and X-BAT), and simulation technologies (Aechelon) for air, maritime, and space platforms operating in complex and contested environments.
