Senior Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration - Expeditionary (R5193)

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 expeditionary platforms builds autonomy solutions for V-BAT - an unmanned aircraft operating in expeditionary environments for ISR, target acquisition, communications, and multi-agent missions.

The team also builds autonomy for X-BAT, a new platform under development by the aircraft team; for X-BAT, the team builds on top of the existing mission autonomy solution from the Strategic Systems (ACP) portfolio and works closely with the aircraft team on the flight-autonomy interface.

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

In this role, you'll own the technical direction for the Expeditionary portfolio, driving the evolution of autonomy architecture across V-BAT and X-BAT while ensuring scalable, mission-ready solutions that support current operators and future platforms. You'll define long-term technical strategy, solve the organization's most complex integration challenges, and influence the direction of autonomy software spanning mission behaviors, platform interfaces, payload integration, executive autonomy, and multi-agent operations.

You'll partner closely with the Aircraft team, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, GCS, Strategic Systems (ACP), engineering leadership, customer/program offices, and operational users to ensure Expeditionary autonomy continues to evolve while remaining reliable in operational environments.