Senior Real-Time Safety-Critical C++ Engineer

AI Chopping Block, Inc.; San Diego, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI, a leading defense-tech company, seeks a Senior Engineer to design, develop, and integrate a real-time Run-Time Assurance (RTA) product. You will contribute to the Hivemind Foundations team, delivering safety-critical software for aircraft and platforms, including HIL and flight-test campaigns.

Your role focuses on C++ development, reliable interfaces, and tests, ensuring safe autonomy at edge operations and across multi-aircraft concepts like the X-BAT UAV family.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 4 years with a Master’s; or 2 years with a PhD.
• Strong C++ development experience with modern standards and performance-aware design.
• Experience in real-time, embedded, robotics, autonomy, aerospace, or similarly constrained systems.
• Familiarity with software-hardware integration, HIL, and test environments.

Responsibilities

• Develop, integrate, and test Run-Time Assurance (RTA) components for autonomy safety.
• Adapt reusable safety capabilities into production runtime components and write interfaces and tests.
• Implement real-time C++ at the boundary of mission autonomy and flight-control interfaces.
• Collaborate across software, systems, test, and platform teams and document designs and ICDs.

Skills

C++ development

Real-time systems

Linux

Git

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Tools

CMake

Conan

Python scripting

Job description

Shield AI, a leading defense-tech company, seeks a Senior Engineer to design, develop, and integrate a real-time Run-Time Assurance (RTA) product. You will contribute to the Hivemind Foundations team, delivering safety-critical software for aircraft and platforms, including HIL and flight-test campaigns.

Your role focuses on C++ development, reliable interfaces, and tests, ensuring safe autonomy at edge operations and across multi-aircraft concepts like the X-BAT UAV family.