The posting, in Shield AI's own words
archived Sep 10, 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.
Job Description:
The Mission Systems Software Engineer will work on developing solutions of a real time system environment to provide mission computing support at the center of an autonomous aircraft with sensor and weapons. This role will work to establish a software architecture for a real time system that operates in a multi-level environment at real time. The role will require work with hardware, software and systems teams to come to a consensus design. This role will focus on development of new systems and software designs from PDR, CoDR, CDR to lab test, flight test and fielding.
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What you'll do:
Serve as a software mission systems engineer for a safety- and mission-critical real-time mission-computing system aligned with A-GRA and AMS-GRA principles, profiles, interfaces, and data standards. Define and maintain the end-to-end software architecture, including mission applications, platform services, middleware, operating-system interfaces, hardware-abstraction layers, networking, data distribution, component boundaries, and APIs. Architect for deterministic real-time performance by addressing scheduling, latency, jitter, synchronization, throughput, resource utilization, distributed processing, and CPU/GPU/accelerator allocation. Develop architecture views, interface definitions, data-flow and deployment models, sequence and timing diagrams, resource budgets, trade studies, and technical decision records. Integrate sensors, effectors, communications, navigation, autonomy, mission management, command-and-control, data-processing, and vehicle services in collaboration with hardware, FPGA, cybersecurity, safety, systems, integration, and test teams. Design for mission resilience and assurance through fault detection and isolation, redundancy, graceful degradation, recovery, health monitoring, cybersecurity, airworthiness, certification, and requirements traceability. Establish engineering practices for concurrency, synchronization, memory and resource management, deterministic execution, interface control, configuration management, and predictable component integration. Define and execute verification strategies across HIL/SIL laboratories, simulations, test benches, flight-test environments, and deployed systems using automated, performance, stress, fault-injection, interface, and timing tests. Maintain technical ownership throughout the system lifecycle by evaluating enabling technologies and supplier designs, analyzing performance, managing technical debt and modernization roadmaps, promoting reuse, and communicating architectural decisions.
Required qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field. 8+ years of professional software-engineering experience, including 3+ years in software architecture, systems architecture, or technical leadership. Experience developing embedded, distributed, real-time, safety-critical, or mission-critical software systems. Proficiency in C, C++, Rust, or another strongly typed systems-programming language. Strong understanding of real-time software principles, including scheduling, concurrency, synchronization, latency, jitter, memory management, and deterministic execution. Experience with embedded operating systems or RTOSs, middleware, interprocess communication, networking, and data-distribution technologies. Experience defining software architectures, APIs, interface-control documents, data flows, deployment models, and system resource budgets. Experience integrating software with hardware, sensors, communications systems, navigation systems, effectors, or other mission-system components. Experience supporting software through requirements development, design reviews, implementation, integration, verification, system test, and deployment. Working knowledge of systems-engineering processes, requirements management, traceability, configuration management, and verification and validation. Ability to analyze system performance using instrumentation, telemetry, traces, profiling, network captures, timing data, and resource-utilization measurements. Strong cross-functional technical leadership, problem-solving, written communication, and presentation skills. Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Department of Defense security clearance; U.S. citizenship may be required for clearance eligibility.