Senior Staff ML Systems Engineer - Vision & Autonomy

Shield AI; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 234,000 - 351,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

Shield AI, a defense-tech company, seeks an experienced ML engineer to develop and deploy autonomous perception models for U.S. and international defense customers. You will build vision, VLM, and VLA models, collaborate across teams, and optimize deployments on embedded hardware.

You will design data pipelines, conduct supervised fine-tuning, and drive production readiness through robust evaluation and tooling, while advancing state-of-the-art AI systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree.
• 9+ years with a Master's degree.
• 7+ years with a PhD.
• Strong understanding of ML fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in production.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models.
• Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops.
• Deploy and optimize ML models for embedded hardware using ONNX, TensorRT, and related frameworks.
• Apply ML techniques to perception and autonomy problems across aerial and autonomous systems.
• Translate research into production-ready capabilities with balance between performance and efficiency.
• Collaborate with perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams to integrate ML capabilities.
• Develop benchmarks and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and guide improvements.
• Improve training infrastructure, tooling, deployment workflows, and lifecycle management.

Skills

Machine learning fundamentals

Strong analytical skills

Ability to obtain SECRET clearance

Education

Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years with Master; or 7 years with PhD

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ONNX

TensorRT

C++

Python

Job description

Shield AI, a defense-tech company, seeks an experienced ML engineer to develop and deploy autonomous perception models for U.S. and international defense customers. You will build vision, VLM, and VLA models, collaborate across teams, and optimize deployments on embedded hardware.

You will design data pipelines, conduct supervised fine-tuning, and drive production readiness through robust evaluation and tooling, while advancing state-of-the-art AI systems.