Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Perception to join the Hivemind Solutions Division. The successful candidate will work on developing and deploying advanced machine learning models for autonomous systems.

What You'll Do:

• 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.

Required Qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 4 years and a Master’s degree; or 2 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Proficiency in 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/fine-tuning 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).

Additional Information:

• Salary: USD 163,200-244,800 per year.
• Benefits: Full-time regular employee offer package: Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity.