Global Field Deployment & Sustainment Engineer

Shieldai; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 152,000 - 228,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment to deploy, support, and sustain Hivemind products in real operating environments. You will install, configure, train, troubleshoot, and generate durable field artifacts while working with customers worldwide.

This role requires strong technical judgment, clear communication, and the ability to travel 50%+, including multi-week deployments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in field engineering, forward-deployed engineering, applications engineering, systems integration, flight test, robotics support, unmanned systems operations, technical operations, customer deployment, or a similar hands-on technical role.
• Strong technical background in software engineering, systems integration, or autonomy-adjacent systems.
• Proficiency writing, reading, and debugging modern C++ code.
• Working proficiency with Python, Bash, or similar scripting for diagnostics, automation, data handling, and field support workflows.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across Linux or embedded systems, networking, configuration management, logs, telemetry, release packages, sensors or payloads, and operator workflows.
• Ability to travel at least 50% of the time, including frequent domestic and international travel and multi-week deployments.
• Ability to operate professionally in lab, flight-test, range, customer-site, and field environments under time pressure.
• Ability to comply with export-control, security, safety, sensitive-data, customer-site, and mission-specific operating requirements.
• Experience with autonomy, robotics, defense aviation, unmanned aircraft, deployed defense systems, flight test, payload integration, sensors, operator systems, or edge compute environments.
• Experience supporting defense, government, allied, or international customers in operational, test, training, or overseas environments.
• Experience building or scaling a support, field-service, customer-success, sustainment, or applications-engineering function during an early product rollout.
• Experience with enterprise software deployment, customer support, licensing, provisioning, release management, configuration baselines, or offline/air-gapped operating environments.
• Hands-on experience with recorded-data analysis, diagnostic tooling, telemetry review, networking tools, system health checks, or support automation.
• FAA Part 107, military aviation or maintenance background, UAS operator experience, flight-test experience, systems engineering experience, or prior Field Service Representative experience.
• Experience using GenAI tools to accelerate troubleshooting, documentation, knowledge capture, data review, or support workflow automation.
• Active or prior security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one when required by program or customer need.

Responsibilities

• Deploy with customers on site globally, with a minimum expectation of 50% travel, to support installation, configuration, validation, training, troubleshooting, and sustainment of Hivemind products.
• Become an expert user of the Hivemind Enterprise software stack, autonomy modules, deployment tooling, supported configurations, and diagnostic workflows.
• Execute and improve deployment runbooks covering software install, version/configuration validation, licensing or provisioning status, pre-mission checks, log readiness, and acceptance steps.
• Provide hands‑on technical support to customer operators, maintainers, partners, and internal field teams during deployment, test, training, demonstration, and sustainment windows.
• Capture and organize field evidence for triage, including logs, telemetry, recorded data, screenshots, version/configuration state, asset context, operator notes, mission phase, and environmental constraints.
• Drive issues through the support flow: intake, severity assessment, ownership, workaround or fix delivery, customer‑safe status, closure, and learning loop.
• Convert recurring field issues, workarounds, customer questions, and training gaps into support tickets, knowledge‑base content, known‑issue records, runbooks, and product feedback.
• Partner with engineering, product, program, sustainment, licensing, safety, legal, commercial, and support teams to route issues to the right owner for seamless customer support.
• Support root‑cause investigation and corrective‑action validation by reproducing issues, collecting field context, testing updates, and confirming fixes or workarounds.

Skills

C++

Python

Linux

Troubleshooting

Field deployment

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering/CS/Robotics/Aerospace

Job description

Shield AI seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment to deploy, support, and sustain Hivemind products in real operating environments. You will install, configure, train, troubleshoot, and generate durable field artifacts while working with customers worldwide.

This role requires strong technical judgment, clear communication, and the ability to travel 50%+, including multi-week deployments.