# Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)

**Company**: Shield AI
**Location**: Washington, DC
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: USD 163,200-244,800 per-year-salary
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/3587ad7b-e57a-4dea-8e14-db52d1808f40?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_46700b94-357

## Description

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.

## Skills

### Required
- machine learning
- computer vision
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- C++
- Python
- ONNX
- TensorRT

### Nice to have
- autonomous systems
- vision-language models
- vision-language-action models
- world models
- open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision

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Source: [Apply at jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/3587ad7b-e57a-4dea-8e14-db52d1808f40?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)