Lead Staff Software Engineer - Perception for Autonomous Systems

Shield AI; Washington (Washington County); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Excellent Medical Coverage

Mental Health Employee Assistance Prog

Paid Parental Leave

Pet Insurance

Flexible Work Hours

Onsite Gym (DC)

Gym Discount (San Diego)

Free Parking

Competitive Compensation

Stock Benefits

401K Services and Match

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a senior ML engineer to lead development of perception models for autonomous systems. You will design, train, and deploy state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models, building scalable data pipelines and robust evaluation loops.

You will collaborate with researchers, perception and autonomy engineers, and platform teams to bridge research with production, optimize models for embedded hardware, and mentor junior engineers as part of a

Qualifications

• Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
• Expertise of machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Experience with training/finetuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and/or world models.
• Contributions to open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision.
• Experience with developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
• Track record of publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical development of advanced machine learning solutions that define the future of perception for autonomous systems.
• Own the team’s most challenging technical problems, drive architecture and model development across multiple efforts.
• Influence how foundation models are adapted, evaluated, and deployed for real-world autonomy.
• Bridge cutting-edge AI research with scalable production systems while mentoring engineers.
• Model Development – Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models.
• Data Pipelines & Model Training – Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops.
• Model Deployment & Optimization – Deploy and optimize ML models for embedded hardware using ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.
• Perception & Autonomy Applications – Solve perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems.
• Research-to-Production – Translate research into production-ready capabilities balancing performance and reliability.
• Cross-functional Collaboration – Partner with perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams to integrate ML into mission-ready systems.
• Model Evaluation & Validation – Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks.
• Continuous Improvement – Improve training infrastructure, tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management.

Skills

C++

Python

TensorRT

ONNX

PyTorch

TensorFlow

3D Vision

Machine Learning Fundamentals

Vision-Language Models

Research to Production

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

ONNX

TensorRT

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a senior ML engineer to lead development of perception models for autonomous systems. You will design, train, and deploy state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models, building scalable data pipelines and robust evaluation loops.

You will collaborate with researchers, perception and autonomy engineers, and platform teams to bridge research with production, optimize models for embedded hardware, and mentor junior engineers as part of a