Senior Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration - Weapons (R5398)

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 lead the technical delivery of complex autonomy capabilities spanning platform integration, fleet operations, and operational deployment. You'll own some of the team's most challenging technical problems while driving technical direction across multiple subsystems and collaborating closely with the Autonomy Capabilities team, Perception, feature crews, autopilot vendors, C2 providers, and customer partners. You'll combine deep technical expertise with systems thinking to deliver scalable autonomy solutions for fleet-scale operations.