Lead ML Engineer – Vision, VLM & Autonomy

f7d8749a-72d6-407c-bf98-292ea630c73a; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 195,000 - 293,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a seasoned ML/AI leader to drive perception system development for autonomous platforms. You will own architecture and model development across multiple efforts, mentor engineers, and align research with scalable production systems.

You will collaborate with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to deploy robust models on embedded hardware. Strong communication and security clearance are essential.

Qualifications

• Minimum 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Expertise of machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance

Responsibilities

• Model Development– Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state‑of‑the‑art vision, vision‑language, and vision‑language‑action models that improve perception and decision‑making for autonomous systems.
• Data Pipelines & Model Training– Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission‑relevant tasks.
• Model Deployment & Optimization– Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware‑accelerated inference frameworks.
• Perception & Autonomy Applications– Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems.
• Research‑to‑Production– Translate cutting‑edge machine learning research into production‑ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.
• Cross‑functional Collaboration– Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission‑ready autonomous systems.
• Model Evaluation & Validation– Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.
• Continuous Improvement– Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.

Skills

Machine learning fundamentals

3D vision

PyTorch

TensorFlow

C++

Python

Clearance

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher

Tools

TensorRT

ONNX

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a seasoned ML/AI leader to drive perception system development for autonomous platforms. You will own architecture and model development across multiple efforts, mentor engineers, and align research with scalable production systems.

You will collaborate with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to deploy robust models on embedded hardware. Strong communication and security clearance are essential.