# Lead Software Architect for XBAT Program

**Company**: Shield AI
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/c59d711d-4370-4d79-af73-5b54d7f19034
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_70c8064d-7a4

## Description

Lead the software architecture for Shield AI's XBAT program across Mission, Vehicle, and Autonomy software domains. Build a safe, secure, and scalable architecture that enables high-assurance, cyber-relevant software development for an advanced airborne system and its ground stations, reporting to the XBAT Software Lead.

Key responsibilities include:

- Defining and evolving the system-wide software architecture for XBAT, spanning airborne vehicle, ground station, and autonomy layers.

- Translating safety and security goals into technical requirements, standards, and design patterns that guide engineers across multiple software teams.

- Ensuring architecture supports safety-critical and cyber-relevant workflows, including formalizing architecture decisions, traceability, and compliance pathways appropriate for advanced airborne systems.

- Driving cross-team alignment on APIs, data flows, fault handling, verification strategy, and risk management so mission, vehicle, and autonomy components integrate cleanly.

- Partnering with engineering leadership, system architects, and validation teams to balance innovation speed with rigorous assurance practices.

- Setting technical direction for long-term scalability: modularity, maintainability, testability, and support for future capability growth or certification needs.

- Mentoring senior engineers and architects, raising the bar for design rigor, documentation quality, and architectural judgment across the organization.

- Producing and maintaining architecture artifacts: high-level system diagrams, component interfaces, data models, risk analyses, and design rationales.

- Leading technical reviews for major features, changes, or integration points; ensuring alignment with architectural standards and safety/security constraints.

- Defining architecture governance: decision records, change control processes, quality gates, and collaboration flows among development, verification, and operations.

- Collaborating with systems, hardware, and avionics teams to manage boundaries, timing, resource allocation, and failure modes that affect overall aircraft and mission performance.

- Driving technology evaluation and roadmap: selecting or validating frameworks, middleware, and tooling that meet performance, assurance, and cyber-hardening needs.

- Supporting external or internal readiness evaluations: providing architectural evidence, participating in reviews, and helping the program articulate compliance posture as requirements evolve.

- Advocating for continuous improvement in architecture practice: metrics, architecture reviews, knowledge sharing, and onboarding for new team members.

## Skills

### Required
- Deep expertise in software architecture for complex, multi-domain systems
- Proven track record designing and delivering production software that must satisfy stringent safety, security, or mission assurance requirements
- Strong systems thinking: able to navigate tradeoffs across performance, latency, reliability, testability, and certification or compliance considerations
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey architecture vision and rationale to engineers, program leads, and stakeholders
- Experience driving architecture adoption and discipline across multiple teams, not just authoring designs in isolation

### Nice to have
- Familiarity with aerospace software assurance frameworks or standards that guide high-assurance airborne software development
- Experience working on or integrating autonomy, mission planning, or AI-enabled software into real-world systems
- Strong understanding of cyber hardening and secure design practices for distributed or networked vehicle systems and ground infrastructure
- Prior leadership or mentor role with responsibility for building and scaling architecture practices and design culture in a fast-moving engineering organization
- Experience dealing with constrained platforms: real-time requirements, limited compute, or avionics-style integration challenges