# Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy - Behavior and Motion Planning (R6007)

**Company**: Shield AI
**Location**: San Diego, California
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: Full Time Employee
**Salary**: USD 200,000-300,000 per-year-salary
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/68a9b3cd-6c74-4cd7-a69f-36f1b92bb623?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_d420e131-177

## Description

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

The Pilot team develops the algorithms and production software that enable intelligent systems to decide what to do and how to do it in uncertain, dynamic environments. As a member of the Behavior and Motion planning team, you will leverage your expertise in robotics to develop, deploy, and optimize path planning algorithms for autonomous systems that operate in complex, real-world environments.

## Responsibilities

- Research, design, and implement state-of-the-art algorithms for autonomous trajectory planning and control for single and multi-agent systems

- Build reliable, robust, and maintainable software, primarily in modern C++, with Python used for prototyping, analysis, automation, and testing

- Develop comprehensive tests and evaluate planning stack performance in simulation and, where applicable, on real hardware

- Diagnose complex algorithmic and software failures, including concurrency, performance, and integration issues

- Collaborate with teams across the organization to refine requirements and deliver capabilities that meet operational needs

- Contribute to the design and architecture of scalable, maintainable autonomy and software architecture

- Develop analysis tools to allow for rapid iteration

- Take new product features from ideation to verification, to flight testing, and all the way to maturation

- Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior engineers

- Stay current with the latest advancements in robotics, and apply them to solve challenging problems

## Projects you might work on:

- Motion planning that produces safe, dynamically feasible behavior under real-world constraints

- Collaborative and distributed motion planning for multi-agent scenarios

- Incorporating various types of motion and dynamics models into the planning stack

- Write software that allows the customer to interact with payloads safely

- Planning approaches that incorporate vision-language models (VLMs), vision-language-action models (VLAs), or other learned components

- Validate the planning stack using software-, hardware-, and vehicle-in-the-loop simulation of complex autonomous missions

## Requirements

- Master's degree in computer science, Robotics, or a related field and 5+ years of relevant professional experience or PhD with 4+ years of relevant experience

- Demonstrated experience through professional work, internships, research, or substantial projects building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for motion planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or a closely related algorithmic domain

- Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including safe use of common concurrency patterns and the ability to diagnose issues such as data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors

- Working experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing

- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, version control, CI/CD, and maintainable software design

- Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux

- Ability to communicate technical decisions and collaborate effectively across disciplines

## Skills

### Required
- C++
- Python
- Robotics
- Autonomous Systems
- Motion Planning
- Software Engineering
- Linux

### Nice to have
- Motion planning for aerial, maritime, space, or ground platforms
- Decentralized or distributed planning for multi-agent systems
- Trajectory optimization
- Vision-language models (VLMs) or vision-language-action models (VLAs)
- Software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop simulation
- Performance profiling
- Distributed systems

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Source: [Apply at jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/68a9b3cd-6c74-4cd7-a69f-36f1b92bb623?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)