SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company developing intelligent autonomy systems to protect service members and civilians. The company produces Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation technologies, with operations globally.
You will research, design, and implement state-of-the-art algorithms for autonomous trajectory planning and control for single and multi-agent systems. Your primary work will be in modern C++, with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, and testing. You'll develop comprehensive tests and evaluate planning stack performance in simulation and on real hardware, diagnosing complex algorithmic and software failures including concurrency, performance, and integration issues.
Key responsibilities include collaborating across teams to refine requirements and deliver capabilities meeting operational needs, contributing to the design and architecture of scalable autonomy systems, developing analysis tools for rapid iteration, and taking features from ideation through verification, flight testing, and maturation. You will mentor junior engineers and stay current with advancements in robotics.
Projects span motion planning for safe, dynamically feasible behavior under real-world constraints; collaborative and distributed motion planning for multi-agent scenarios; incorporating various motion and dynamics models; enabling safe payload interaction; planning approaches using vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs); and validating the planning stack using software-, hardware-, and vehicle-in-the-loop simulation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field with 5+ years relevant professional experience, OR PhD with 4+ years relevant experience
- Demonstrated experience building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for motion planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or closely related algorithmic domain (through professional work, internships, research, or substantial projects)
- Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including safe use of common 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, version control, CI/CD, and maintainable software design
- Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux
- Ability to communicate technical decisions and collaborate effectively across disciplines
PREFERRED:
- Experience with motion planning for aerial, maritime, space, or ground platforms
- Experience with decentralized or distributed planning for multi-agent systems or trajectory optimization
- Experience applying VLMs or VLAs to motion planning in safety-critical systems
- 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
- Evidence of technical depth through fielded systems, applied research, publications, open-source contributions, or robotics/autonomy competitions
