Senior Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration – Emerging Domains (R5423)

Shield AI; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI, founded in 2015, is a defense-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent autonomous systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software and aircraft such as V-BAT and X-BAT.

The Autonomous Pilot Integration team builds autonomy solutions for emerging platforms and mission profiles, collaborating across capabilities to stand up new autonomy. In this hands-on role, you'll develop and integrate autonomy capabilities across diverse platforms,

Job description

Founded in 2015, 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 and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. 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.

The Autonomous Pilot Integration team for Emerging Domains builds autonomy solutions for new platforms and mission profiles outside Shield AI's established portfolios—including space (satellites, missile defense), maritime (USV and UUV integration), and contested logistics (unmanned helicopters and related autonomous resupply platforms). The team takes on short-term R&D and integration efforts—often standing up the first autonomy on a brand-new platform or mission—with the intent that successful efforts grow into larger, multi-year programs. We combine capabilities from the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team (e.g., ViDAR, ATR), and the HivemindSDK—selectively leveraging existing Shield AI autonomy solutions where they apply—to develop autonomy that runs on these new platforms. Our engineers write new autonomy code—such as mission behaviors, platform-specific control, multi-agent coordination, contingencies, and executive autonomy—and own it end-to-end from software-in-the-loop, to hardware-in-the-loop, to vehicle-in-the-loop, to live test exercise.

In this role, you'll develop and integrate autonomy capabilities across a variety of emerging-domain platforms while helping establish autonomy on systems that often have no existing autonomy baseline. You'll work closely with platform teams, the Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, and GCS teams, feature crews, and customer stakeholders to solve complex integration challenges and deliver mission-ready autonomy software. This is a hands-on role for engineers who enjoy working across diverse platforms, solving ambiguous technical problems, and seeing new capabilities operate in real-world environments.