Staff Engineer, Autonomy Behaviors

Shield 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 https://shield.ai/. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/shield-ai, X https://x.com/shieldaitech, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shield_ai, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@Shield_AI. Staff Software Engineers on the Autonomy Behaviors team will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviors into our products, acting as technical leads, extremely senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect Staff Engineers to demonstrate unparalleled end-to-end outcome ownership, driving the architecting, design, delivery, support, and evolution of safe and effective mission autonomy software throughout the entire product lifecycle. - - Develop tactical autonomy software to enable unmanned platforms to perform complex missions across air, land, sea, and space domains with minimal human supervision. - Implement and test behaviors that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios. - Work throughout the entire of the software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilizing tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development. - Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and to enable reuse of behaviors across multiple projects and portfolios. - Utilize your software and systems expertise to architect behaviors as scalable software subsystems, that may interact directly or indirectly with a breadth of system components (e.g., sensor processing, state estimation, peer-to-peer communications, contingency management, actuation, and payload interfacing). - Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms (whether internally and externally owned), with a clear path towards architecture and capability evolution over time. - Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts (e.g., fighter pilots, UAV operators, etc.) - Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment including engineering, business and sales leadership. - Travel to co-locate with end-users and/or other teams up to 20% of the time Required Qualifications: - - BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field. - Proficient in production-level C++ software development. - 7+ years' experience in one or more of the following: software sub-system scheduling and integration, behavior planning, task and resource allocation, motion planning, optimization, or flight controls. - Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management. - Proven ability to lead multi-disciplinary teams, set technical direction, and manage full project lifecycles from concept to deployment. - Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity. - Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment. - Capacity to act as the technical owner for an entire software system, including stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, roadmap management, team co-ordination, design, implementation, sustainment, and evolution. Preferred Qualifications: - - Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready - Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to: - Collaborative mission planning, behavior planning, synchronized teaming. - Automated red force vs blue force tactics. - Motion planning across a variety of vehicle classes, kinematic constraints, and team compositions. - Weapons target assignment, Sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws. - Collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring. - Experience in more than one operational effect (e.g., strike, air combat, surveillance, reconnaissance, etc.) and more than one associated domain (e.g., air, space, maritime, ground, etc.) - Experience with FOSS software that is commonly used in robotic systems (e.g., ROS, OMPL, optimization solvers, etc.) - Experience with simulation tools and environments (e.g., AFSIM, NGTS) for testing and validation. - Familiarity with practical aspects of navigation and communications systems. - Experience across the product delivery lifecycle, from emerging opportunity through system acceptance, deployment, and sustainment. - Familiarity with systems engineering methodologies. - Familiarity with high-assurance software development processes (e.g., DO-178C or equivalent MIL-STD's). Total package details for U.S. based positions: - Regular employee positions: Salary within range listed above + Bonus + Benefits + Equity - Temporary employee positions: Hourly within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment) - Interns/Military Fellows/Part-time not eligible for b