Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration - Expeditionary (R5208)

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 lead the technical delivery of complex autonomy capabilities spanning platform integration, mission autonomy, and operational deployment. You'll own some of the team's most challenging technical problems-from defining flight-autonomy interfaces and integrating advanced payloads to driving mission readiness for customer releases. You'll influence technical direction across multiple subsystems while partnering closely with the Aircraft team, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, GCS, Strategic Systems (ACP), feature crews, and customer stakeholders.

You'll combine deep technical expertise with systems thinking to drive successful integration across software, hardware, and operations while mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices across the Expeditionary portfolio.