Head of AI & Robotics for Unmanned Systems

Shield; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 290,000 - 430,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Benefits

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a senior leader to build and drive a team that researches, designs, and deploys reasoning and cognition models for unmanned platforms across aerial, maritime, land, and space domains.

You will define roadmaps, balance foundation models with specialized AI, and ensure edge-enabled performance in contested environments while collaborating with perception, MLOps, and simulation teams.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and/or similar degree, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 8 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Exceptional track record of leading the development and deployment of state-of-the-art ML models in production environments, making difficult prioritisation decisions, and communicating tradeoffs across disciplines.
• 5+ years of people management experience leading engineering or applied research teams, with demonstrated success hiring, coaching, developing technical leaders, and managing performance.
• Deep expertise in foundation models, modern deep learning, model architectures, and the training ecosystem.
• Strong command of training and adaptation approaches such as self-supervised learning, supervised fine-tuning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and distillation.

Responsibilities

• Build & lead the team that designs, trains, adapts, and evaluates reasoning and cognition models intended for deployment across our unmanned platforms.
• Define the technical roadmap for single-agent and multi-agent models, including architecture choices, training methods, data strategy, and evaluation criteria.
• Make informed tradeoffs among foundation-model approaches (e.g. VLMs, VLAs), specialized deep-learning models, and traditional AI/ML methods.
• Advance model capabilities for interpreting context, reasoning over time, coordinating among agents, and adapting to incomplete or changing information.
• Drive training efforts, including appropriate use of self-supervised learning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and distillation.
• Establish rigorous evaluations in simulation and with real-world data. Measure generalization, robustness, uncertainty, and performance as team size and operating conditions change.
• Recruit, develop, and manage a high-performing team of AI/ML engineers.
• Translate edge constraints into model-design and training decisions in partnership with hardware, autonomy, and inference teams.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and model limitations clearly to research, engineering, product, and organizational leadership.
• Deliver trained models and clear performance evidence to partner teams.
• Create tight feedback loops among model failures, data curation, training experiments, and re-evaluation.

Skills

Leadership

ML models

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Edge AI

Robotics

Edge compute

Education

BS/MS in CS/EE/ME/AE or equivalent

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a senior leader to build and drive a team that researches, designs, and deploys reasoning and cognition models for unmanned platforms across aerial, maritime, land, and space domains.

You will define roadmaps, balance foundation models with specialized AI, and ensure edge-enabled performance in contested environments while collaborating with perception, MLOps, and simulation teams.