Autonomy Integration Engineer - Flight-Ready Systems

Speedrun Talent Network; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration, to be embedded in the Pilot Integration team and work day to day with Pilot's cross‑functional Integration team. You will build durable integration capability, end‑to‑end tests, diagnosable failures, and software ready for hardware and flight testing.

The Pilot Integration team builds and maintains environments where Hivemind Pilot's autonomy capabilities come together, spanning planning and controls, perception, simulation, vehicle

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision‑making software.
• Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python.
• Hands‑on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging.
• Experience with software‑in‑the‑loop or hardware‑in‑the‑loop testing and automated system‑level tests.
• Experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
• Strong systems‑debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries.
• Ability to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real‑time systems.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines.
• Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight‑test events that may occur outside normal working hours.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end‑to‑end examples.
• Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility.
• Develop and maintain automated software‑in‑the‑loop and hardware‑in‑the‑loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components.
• Integrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack.
• Investigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration‑owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required.
• Develop integration‑oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them.
• Improve repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage.
• Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging.
• Work with the flight‑test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward.
• Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples. Contribute technical material to Pilot training.
• Surface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems so that the responsible Pilot teams can make informed architectural decisions.
• Improve integration quality by reducing integration defects and increasing end‑to‑end test readiness.

Skills

C++

Python

Software integration

Linux

Robotics hardware

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Robotics

Tools

ROS

MAVLink

Test automation frameworks

Job description

Shield AI is hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration, to be embedded in the Pilot Integration team and work day to day with Pilot's cross‑functional Integration team. You will build durable integration capability, end‑to‑end tests, diagnosable failures, and software ready for hardware and flight testing.

The Pilot Integration team builds and maintains environments where Hivemind Pilot's autonomy capabilities come together, spanning planning and controls, perception, simulation, vehicle