Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)

Shield AI; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. The Hivemind Solutions Perception team builds vision, VLM, and VLA models that enable autonomous platforms to understand scenes and environments for mission-critical applications.

Join us to own major ML features from development to deployment, working with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to deliver reliable, production-ready

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.

The Hivemind Solutions Perception team develops the next generation of perception capabilities for autonomous systems by combining state-of-the-art machine learning with the proven foundations of computer vision. The team advances how autonomous platforms understand and interpret the world by developing vision, vision-language (VLM), and vision-language-action (VLA) models that tackle core perception challenges such as object understanding, scene interpretation, and mission-relevant environmental awareness. Working at the intersection of research and production, our engineers build the data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure needed to transform cutting-edge AI research into reliable, mission-ready perception capabilities.

In this role, you'll develop and deploy advanced machine learning models that solve real-world perception challenges for autonomous systems. You'll own major features from model development through deployment, working closely with machine learning researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to bring cutting-edge AI capabilities into production. This is an ideal opportunity for engineers who enjoy solving difficult perception problems while building reliable, production-ready ML systems that operate on autonomous platforms in complex operational environments.