Senior AI Engineer – Edge Autonomy for Unmanned Systems

F7d8749a; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Benefits

Equity

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer to shape the future of physical AI in defense by building reasoning models for unmanned autonomous systems across aerial, maritime, land, and space domains. You’ll own model architectures, training objectives, and evaluations for edge deployment, partnering with perception, MLOps, simulation, autonomy, and inference teams to deliver reliable capabilities.

You will drive design choices, experiment with tradeoffs among models, and establish rigorous evaluation

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and/or similar degree, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, train, adapt, and evaluate reasoning and cognition models for unmanned autonomous platforms.
• Make and validate tradeoffs among foundation-model approaches, including vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs), specialized deep-learning models, and traditional AI/ML methods.
• Develop capabilities for interpreting context, reasoning over time, coordinating among agents, and adapting to incomplete or changing information.
• Build reproducible training and adaptation workflows using appropriate combinations of self-supervised learning, supervised fine‑tuning, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and distillation.
• Define data requirements, training objectives, benchmarks, and evaluation methods that support meaningful comparisons among model approaches.
• Establish rigorous evaluations in simulation and with real-world data, measuring generalization, robustness, uncertainty, and performance as team size and operating conditions change.
• Incorporate edge constraints into model architecture and training decisions in partnership with hardware, autonomy, and inference teams.
• Diagnose model failures and create feedback loops among data curation, training experiments, and re-evaluation.
• Deliver trained models, reproducible results, and clear performance evidence to partner teams.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs, experimental findings, and model limitations clearly to research, engineering, product, and organizational leadership.

Skills

Foundation models

Multimodal ML

Edge compute

Robotics AI

Production ML

Model evaluation

Education

MS or PhD in CS/EE

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

NVIDIA Jetson

Edge devices

Simulation tools

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer to shape the future of physical AI in defense by building reasoning models for unmanned autonomous systems across aerial, maritime, land, and space domains. You’ll own model architectures, training objectives, and evaluations for edge deployment, partnering with perception, MLOps, simulation, autonomy, and inference teams to deliver reliable capabilities.

You will drive design choices, experiment with tradeoffs among models, and establish rigorous evaluation