Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration - Weapons (R5427)

About Shield AI

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide.

The Autonomous Pilot Integration team for launched effects builds autonomy solutions for small, often air- or ground-launched platforms that operate in multi-agent fleets and frequently in disconnected or air-gapped environments.

We combine capabilities from the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team (e.g., track fusion), and the HivemindSDK to develop the autonomy software that runs on launched effects platforms, then integrate, validate, and field it on the real hardware-for U.S. and international defense customers.

Our engineers write new autonomy code-such as mission behaviors, platform-specific control, multi-agent coordination, contingencies, and executive autonomy-and own it end-to-end from software-in-the-loop, to hardware-in-the-loop, to vehicle-in-the-loop, to live test exercise.

In this role, you'll develop and integrate autonomy capabilities for launched effects platforms, owning major features from design through operational deployment. You'll work closely with the Autonomy Capabilities and Perception teams, feature crews, autopilot vendors (e.g., PX4, ArduPilot), C2 providers, and customer partners to deliver mission-ready autonomy software. This is a hands-on role for engineers who enjoy solving challenging integration problems and seeing their software operate in demanding real-world environments.