The posting, in Shield AI's own words
archived Oct 3, 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:
Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples. Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility. Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components. Integrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack. Investigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required. Develop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them. Improve repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage. Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging. Work with the flight-test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward. Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples. Contribute technical material to Pilot training. Surface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems so that the responsible Pilot teams can make informed architectural decisions. Improve integration quality by reducing integration defects and increasing end-to-end test readiness.
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Required qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience. Experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software. Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python. Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging. Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests. Experience developing and debugging software on Linux. Strong systems-debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries. Ability to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems. Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines. Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight-test events that may occur outside normal working hours.
Preferred qualifications:
Experience integrating across several autonomy domains, such as perception, state estimation, planning, controls, simulation, communications, or vehicle interfaces. Experience supporting aircraft integration or flight-test readiness. Experience with robotics middleware, vehicle protocols such as MAVLink, or integration adaptors. Experience designing repeatable, diagnosable end-to-end test environments for complex autonomous systems. Experience with configuration-driven systems, dependency compatibility, observability, or automated test orchestration. Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained systems. A record of leading ambiguous technical investigations or mentoring engineers through complex integration work.