Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge Platform, Tools (R5790)

Front Door Defense; San Diego, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to own the Forge platform and evolve an extensible engineering environment for AI-assisted workflows. You will work across frontend architecture, backend services, platform contracts, and deployment to validate the platform with real engineering workloads.

You will collaborate with domain experts to build initial applications, ensure consistency across environments, and design contracts that enable external Forge applications to integrate with

Qualifications

• Experience owning production full-stack applications from design and implementation through rollout and support.
• Strong proficiency with TypeScript and React or an equivalent modern web stack.
• Experience building production backend services in Go, Python, Rust, or a comparable language.
• Experience designing typed, versioned APIs and contracts between independently deployed components.
• Strong knowledge of web and distributed-system architecture, including state management and security.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate a full-stack platform embedded in the workflows used to train, validate, and deploy the AI Pilot.
• Design a composable UI architecture that lets applications contribute widgets, dashboards, and contexts.
• Define typed, versioned contracts between the platform and Forge applications.
• Create workflows to package, publish, configure, install, and upgrade applications.
• Enable Forge's AI experiences and external harnesses to understand context and invoke tools.
• Deliver consistent behavior across local-development and remote-cluster environments.
• Collaborate with subject-matter experts to validate the platform against real workflows.
• Shape the platform architecture across infrastructure, security, product, and design.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Go

Python

Rust

APIs

Distributed systems

Frontend architecture

Backend services

Job description

Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge Platform, Tools (R5790)

Own and evolve the Forge platform to enable AI-assisted workflows for engineers

Location: San Diego, California

Compensation: $130,000 - 230,000 USD / year

About The Role

Full-Stack Engineer

Shield AI is a defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. We build autonomy systems for air, maritime, space, and other platforms operating in complex and contested environments.

We are looking for a full-stack engineer interested in customer-facing products, developer tools, and AI-assisted workflows. You will partner with internal subject-matter experts to build an extensible application platform and complete applications on it.

Shield AI's Hivemind developers are the platform's primary design partners and proving ground. Forge is also designed for external engineering teams to adopt, extend, and integrate into their own environments.

You will help evolve Forge into an integrated engineering environment with shared foundations for APIs, user interfaces, extensions, model integrations, and agent tools. Working across frontend architecture, backend services, platform contracts, and deployment, you will validate the platform through real workflows. Your work will help engineers understand complex systems, develop autonomy software, investigate failures, and deliver reliable capabilities faster.

What you'll do:

• Build and operate a full-stack platform embedded in the workflows used to train, validate, and deploy the AI Pilot.
• Design a composable UI architecture that lets applications contribute widgets, dashboards, commands, and shared resource context.
• Define typed, versioned contracts between the platform and independently developed Forge applications.
• Create workflows for teams to package, publish, configure, install, upgrade, and disable applications.
• Enable Forge's native AI experiences and external agent harnesses to understand active context, invoke authorized tools, navigate applications, and compose dashboards.
• Deliver consistent application behavior across local-development and remote-cluster environments.
• Partner with simulation, autonomy, and ML subject-matter experts to build initial applications, validate the platform against real workflows, and incorporate what you learn.
• Work across infrastructure, security, product, and design to shape the platform's architecture and engineering practices.

Key outcomes: A successful engineer in this role will help deliver the following outcomes:

• Applications behave consistently across local-development and remote-cluster environments, even when their deployment and service lifecycles differ.
• Application developers can move quickly using clear contracts, examples, documentation, and authoring guides.
• Hivemind teams can develop, integrate, test, and diagnose autonomy capabilities more quickly using Forge applications and platform services.
• Users can combine applications, tools, and shared context into persistent workflows tailored to their needs and share those workflows within their organization.
• Internal teams and external customers can build integrated Forge applications that extend these workflows without modifying the core platform.
• Forge's embedded AI and external agent harnesses can explore and operate the same catalog of platform tools through shared contracts.

Required qualifications:

• Experience owning production full-stack applications from design and implementation through rollout and support.
• Strong proficiency with TypeScript and React or an equivalent modern web stack.
• Experience building production backend services in Go, Python, Rust, or a comparable language.
• Experience designing typed, versioned APIs and contracts between independently deployed components.
• Strong knowledge of web and distributed-system architecture, including state management, routing, asynchronous communication, browser security, authentication, authorization, and failure handling.
• Ability to build intuitive technical tools for engineers and test them at the unit, integration, and system levels.
• Sound judgment about when to extend an existing system, introduce an abstraction, or keep a solution intentionally small.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and product disciplines.

Why join us:

• Connect your work directly to the mission. The platform and applications you build help engineers develop, validate, and deliver the autonomy software behind Hivemind.
• Define human-and-agent workflows. Design how engineers and AI agents use the same platform tools while preserving user control, security, and accountability.
• Own complete workflows. Work across user experience, frontend architecture, backend services, APIs, deployment, and operations.
• Build alongside engaged users. Partner with engineers solving autonomy, simulation, data, and infrastructure problems, and see the direct effect of your decisions.

$130,000 - $230,000 a year