Senior Real-Time Mission Systems Software Architect

Shieldai; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Benefits

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Mission Systems Software Engineer to develop a real-time system for autonomous aircraft, coordinating with hardware, software, and systems teams from design through fielding. You will define architecture, ensure deterministic performance, and drive verification across labs and flight tests, contributing to safety-critical mission capabilities in defense contexts.

The role requires an 8+ year software background with architecture experience, strong C/C++/Rust skills,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a related technical field.
• 8+ years of professional software-engineering experience, including 3+ years in software architecture or technical leadership.
• Experience with embedded, distributed, real-time, safety-critical, or mission-critical software systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the end-to-end software architecture, including mission applications, platform services, middleware, operating-system interfaces, hardware-abstraction layers, networking, data distribution, component boundaries, and APIs.
• Architect for deterministic real-time performance by addressing scheduling, latency, jitter, synchronization, throughput, resource utilization, distributed processing, and CPU/GPU/accelerator allocation.
• Design for mission resilience and assurance through fault detection and isolation, redundancy, graceful degradation, recovery, health monitoring, cybersecurity, airworthiness, certification, and requirements traceability.
• Establish engineering practices for concurrency, synchronization, memory and resource management, deterministic execution, interface control, configuration management, and predictable component integration.

Skills

Real-time software principles

Cross-functional leadership

C/C++ proficiency

Systems thinking

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

C

C++

Rust

RTOS

Middleware

Networking

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Mission Systems Software Engineer to develop a real-time system for autonomous aircraft, coordinating with hardware, software, and systems teams from design through fielding. You will define architecture, ensure deterministic performance, and drive verification across labs and flight tests, contributing to safety-critical mission capabilities in defense contexts.

The role requires an 8+ year software background with architecture experience, strong C/C++/Rust skills,