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Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is seeking a Staff Engineer, Industrial to lead sustainment analytics and decision support for fielded aircraft systems. This role owns the full spectrum of sustainment engineering: maintenance-level determinations, repair-versus-replace assessments, spares optimization, manpower analysis, and support-equipment trade studies.
Key responsibilities include building and maintaining integrated fleet-readiness and availability models that link reliability, maintainability, maintenance demand, repair turnaround time, inventory, supply lead times, labor availability, operational utilization, repair capacity, and cost to readiness outcomes. You will develop repair-versus-replace and repair-network business cases, analyzing discard, organizational/field-level repair, depot/centralized repair, supplier return, and redesign alternatives using repair yield, turnaround time, labor, test-equipment requirements, supply lead times, fleet impact, risk, and lifecycle cost.
You will analyze maintenance records, work orders, failure and repair history, supply and logistics data, labor data, and fleet operations data to identify recurring maintenance burdens, demand drivers, capacity constraints, bottlenecks, readiness risks, and high-value sustainment opportunities. Develop demand forecasts, spares recommendations, and provisioning strategies using failure rates, consumption history, repair turnaround times, operational tempo, lead times, service-level targets, and deployment requirements.
Perform manpower, workload, capacity, and skill-mix analyses to define staffing needs and improve repair throughput. Evaluate investments in support equipment, test equipment, tooling, facilities, and repair capability by quantifying capacity, utilization, cost, risk reduction, readiness impact, ROI, and total lifecycle value. Develop lifecycle-cost models and economic trade studies to inform sustainment planning, maintenance-program changes, provisioning decisions, repair-network strategy, and leadership investment decisions.
Apply Pareto, trend, statistical, sensitivity, and scenario analyses to prioritize actions that improve fleet availability, reduce downtime, lower sustainment cost, and mitigate readiness risk. Translate complex analyses into clear recommendations, decision packages, executive-ready briefings, and prioritized action plans for sustainment leadership and cross-functional stakeholders. Establish repeatable sustainment analytics processes, including data standards, modeling methods, decision criteria, assumptions management, and lessons-learned feedback loops; mature the capability toward predictive maintenance, condition-based maintenance, and proactive fleet-health decision support.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Operations Research, Data Analytics, or related technical discipline; equivalent practical experience considered.
- 5+ years of experience in industrial engineering, sustainment, logistics, supportability, maintenance, operations research, fleet operations, aviation sustainment, defense logistics, or other complex hardware-support environments.
- Demonstrated experience using maintenance, reliability, repair, inventory, supply-chain, production, fleet-operations, or fielded-hardware data to develop quantitative analyses and recommendations related to availability, readiness, repair capability, logistics, labor, capacity, cost, and operational performance.
- Experience performing repair-versus-replace, make-versus-buy, repair-capability, or comparable sustainment trade studies; ability to build structured models, quantify assumptions, conduct sensitivity analyses, compare alternatives, and communicate uncertainty and risk.
- Proficiency with SQL, Python, Power BI, Tableau, Excel, R, MATLAB, or comparable tools for data analysis, modeling, visualization, and reporting.
- Ability to integrate technical, operational, supply-chain, labor, and financial inputs into practical, data-driven recommendations for complex sustainment decisions while balancing analytical rigor, data limitations, operational urgency, customer impact, fleet readiness, cost, and long-term sustainment needs.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills; ability to work with engineering, fleet support, supply chain, manufacturing, finance, operations, and analytics teams; develop clear decision packages, technical analyses, recommendations, and leadership-level summaries; independently drive decisions without direct authority.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Familiarity with aviation, defense, aerospace manufacturing, unmanned systems, aircraft sustainment, and deployed hardware systems.
- Familiarity with RCCA, FRACAS, PQDR, AS9100, service bulletins, maintenance releases, supply chain and workforce management.
- Proficiency with SQL, Excel, Python, Salesforce, Foundry, or similar platforms.
- Demonstrated ability to collect, clean, join, and structure data from multiple operational, maintenance, failure, or quality systems.
- Experience developing metrics, dashboards, or recurring reports that improved decision-making, increased visibility, or reduced manual reporting effort.
- Demonstrated success identifying and correcting data-quality, traceability, or reporting issues before they affected technical or business decisions.
- Ability to translate complex data into clear, decision-ready information for technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience supporting military, government, international, or deployed aviation customers.
- Familiarity with ITAR, export-controlled technical data, or controlled customer environments.
- Active Secret or Top Secret clearance.
