The posting, in Shield AI's own words
archived Sep 26, 2026Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
What you'll do:
Lead end-to-end execution of complex UAS, autonomy, mission-system, or customer-delivery programs, achieving technical, schedule, cost, quality, and customer objectives. Own integrated program plans, including scope, milestones, schedules, critical path, resource needs, dependencies, risks, issues, decisions, and change control. Partner with technical leads to ensure requirements, interfaces, verification plans, test readiness, technical baselines, and customer acceptance criteria are clear, measurable, and traceable. Lead cross-functional system integration and test execution across hardware, software, autonomy, systems engineering, test, manufacturing, flight operations, cybersecurity, and field/customer teams. Drive timely resolution of technical, programmatic, and cross-team issues; facilitate trade studies, risk mitigations, recovery plans, and leadership decisions when needed. Establish and lead an effective multi-team delivery cadence, including integrated planning, dependency reviews, program execution reviews, system demonstrations, release-readiness reviews, and continuous-improvement activities. Coordinate delivery across multiple engineering teams, releases, and customer commitments; identify and remove systemic blockers that affect integrated capability delivery. Communicate technical status, risks, tradeoffs, decisions, and delivery outlook clearly to engineering leadership, executives, customers, and external stakeholders. Develop and use program metrics and dashboards to improve execution predictability, integration readiness, requirements-verification status, risk posture, and release performance. Mentor project engineers and technical leads in integrated planning, systems-engineering execution, risk management, and cross-functional delivery practices.
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Required qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related STEM discipline. Typically 8–12+ years of experience in systems engineering, project engineering, technical program management, aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomy, UAS, or a similarly complex technical environment. Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional technical programs involving multiple engineering disciplines and delivering integrated products, capabilities, or customer solutions. Strong systems-engineering experience, including requirements management, traceability, interface management, system integration, verification and validation, test planning/execution, and configuration or technical-baseline management. Proven program-management capability, including integrated planning and scheduling, scope management, resource coordination, risk and issue management, stakeholder communication, and execution reporting. Experience coordinating multiple teams or technical workstreams toward shared releases, demonstrations, system-level milestones, or customer deliveries. Strong written, verbal, and executive communication skills, with the ability to explain technical status, risks, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance. Willingness to travel up to 25%.