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.

As a Staff Engineer on the Autonomy Behaviors team, you 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.

Responsibilities:

• 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 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 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.
• Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms.
• Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts.
• Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment.
• 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 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, weapons target assignment, sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws, collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring.
• Experience with FOSS software that is commonly used in robotic systems.
• Experience with simulation tools and environments 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.

Additional Information:

• Total package details for U.S. based positions: Salary within range + Bonus + Benefits + Equity.
• Total package details for International positions: International premium, hardship differential, cost of living differential, living quarters allowance, foreign service transfer allowance, equity, international benefits, visa assistance, and relocation assistance.