Senior Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability (R5720)

Shield; Melbourne (KY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI seeks a Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability to create tools that help engineers understand, diagnose, and improve complex software systems. You'll work with C++ and Python applications, develop developer-facing observability, and build React-based interfaces and workflows.

You will contribute to the integration and presentation of diagnostic information, with a focus on usability and reliability of internal tooling as a product.

Qualifications

• Experience building developer-facing tooling and observability solutions.
• Strong skills in diagnosing and debugging complex software systems.
• Ability to work with cross-functional teams to deliver tooling products.

Responsibilities

• Build tools that help engineers develop, understand, and diagnose complex software systems.
• Work with C++/Python applications, observability, web services, and React-based UI tooling.
• Focus on developer-facing observability: integrating logs, telemetry, events, and system state.
• Treat internal tooling as a product, prioritizing usability, reliability, maintainability, and performance.

Skills

C++ development

Python development

Observability

Developer tooling

Tools

React

Web services

Job description

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

Job Description:

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability to build the tools that help engineers develop, understand, and diagnose complex software systems.

You will work close to the systems our engineers are building, developing tooling that makes those systems easier to understand and work with. This includes C++ and Python applications, developer-facing observability, web services, React-based user interfaces, visualisations, and engineering workflows.

A major focus of the role is developer-facing observability. Bringing together logs, telemetry, events, faults, and system state so engineers can quickly move from 'something went wrong' to 'I understand what happened and where to investigate.'

You will be comfortable working within complex C++ software systems and understanding how they behave, while looking for opportunities to turn that understanding into better tools for other engineers. This could mean understanding how a component exposes diagnostic information, building services that aggregate it, or designing how that information should be presented to an engineer investigating a problem.

The role sits at the intersection of systems software, developer experience, observability, and engineering tooling. We treat internal tooling as a product. Usability, reliability, maintainability, performance, and the experience of the engineers using it all matter.

Our scope is focused on internal tooling products, Developer Experience, engineering-facing web services, UI/UX for system tooling,and licensing services. This is not a general DevOps or CI/CD engineering role. CI/CD platforms, build and release automation, pipeline infrastructure, build performance, and test execution pipelines sit outside the team's scope.