Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems.

We are hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration, who will be embedded in the Planning and Controls team and work day to day with Pilot's cross-functional Integration team.

In this hands-on software role, you will build durable integration capability: reliable environments, representative end-to-end tests, diagnosable failures, and software that is ready for hardware and flight testing.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples.
• Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility.
• Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components.
• Integrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack.
• Investigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required.
• Develop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them.
• Improve repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage.
• Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging.
• Work with the flight-test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward.
• Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples. Contribute technical material to Pilot training.
• Surface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems so that the responsible Pilot teams can make informed architectural decisions.
• Improve integration quality by reducing integration defects and increasing end-to-end test readiness.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software.
• Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python.
• Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging.
• Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests.
• Experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
• Strong systems-debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries.
• Ability to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines.
• Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight-test events that may occur outside normal working hours.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience integrating across several autonomy domains, such as perception, state estimation, planning, controls, simulation, communications, or vehicle interfaces.
• Experience supporting aircraft integration or flight-test readiness.
• Experience with robotics middleware, vehicle protocols such as MAVLink, or integration adaptors.
• Experience designing repeatable, diagnosable end-to-end test environments for complex autonomous systems.
• Experience with configuration-driven systems, dependency compatibility, observability, or automated test orchestration.
• Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained systems.
• A record of leading ambiguous technical investigations or mentoring engineers through complex integration work.