Description
Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join the Hivemind Solutions Perception team. The team develops next-generation perception capabilities for autonomous systems by combining state-of-the-art machine learning with computer vision.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will develop and deploy advanced machine learning models that enable autonomous systems to better understand, reason about, and interact with their environment. You will partner with machine learning researchers, autonomy engineers, perception engineers, and platform teams to translate emerging AI capabilities into reliable, production-ready systems for U.S. and international defense customers.
Responsibilities:
- Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models that improve perception and decision-making for autonomous systems.
- Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission-relevant tasks.
- Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.
- Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments.
- Translate cutting-edge machine learning research into production-ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.
- Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission-ready autonomous systems.
- Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.
- Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.
Requirements:
- Minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
- Mastery of machine learning fundamentals.
- Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
- Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
- Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
- Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate research into practical applications.
- Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
- Experience with training/finetuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and/or world models.
- Contributions to open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision.
- Track record of publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).
Benefits:
- Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
- Temporary employee offer package: Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)