Staff Engineer, HIL Networking & Automation

Lever, Inc.; Washington, Northern (District of Columbia, KY); Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 216,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is a defense-tech company hiring for a Senior Network Engineer to design, implement, and maintain scalable networks for HIL laboratories and simulation environments. You will define Layer 2/3 configurations and develop networking software, automation tools, and validation utilities to ensure repeatable lab deployments.

The role focuses on integrating hardware, radios, flight computers, sensors, and SDR platforms into program networks, while building observability and CI/CD integrated

Qualifications

• Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 3 years with a Master's degree; or equivalent practical experience in network engineering, systems integration, test infrastructure, or software development.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, configure, and maintain scalable network architectures for HIL laboratories, integration environments, simulation systems, and shared test infrastructure across multiple programs
• Define and manage Layer 2 and Layer 3 configurations, including addressing, VLANs, routing, multicast, QoS, access controls, redundancy, and time-synchronization services
• Develop and maintain networking software, configuration-as-code, automation tools, and validation utilities that make lab network deployment repeatable, reviewable, and recoverable
• Integrate switches, routers, firewalls, servers, real-time compute, simulators, flight computers, sensors, radios, and other program hardware into representative HIL and program network environments
• Develop and execute network test plans that measure connectivity, interoperability, throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, multicast behavior, failover, and performance under load
• Build network observability capabilities using packet capture, device telemetry, logs, metrics, alerts, dashboards, and automated health checks
• Reproduce, isolate, and resolve complex network and distributed-system issues using Wireshark, tcpdump, traffic generators, device diagnostics, application logs
• Partner with Solutions & Integration teams to reproduce deployed networking issues, translate customer and operational feedback into representative HIL network configurations and tests
• Maintain authoritative network baselines, IP address assignments, hardware inventories, cable and port maps, architecture diagrams, interface-control documentation, and change records
• Integrate network configuration and test automation into source-control and CI/CD workflows, including peer review, automated verification, deployment, rollback, and auditability
• Evaluate network equipment and technologies, support capacity planning and procurement, standardize reusable solutions, and provide technical guidance to lab users and program teams

Skills

Ethernet & TCP/IP

Python programming

Lab networking experience

Communication

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Wireshark

tcpdump

iperf

Ansible

Terraform

Job description

Shield AI is a defense-tech company hiring for a Senior Network Engineer to design, implement, and maintain scalable networks for HIL laboratories and simulation environments. You will define Layer 2/3 configurations and develop networking software, automation tools, and validation utilities to ensure repeatable lab deployments.

The role focuses on integrating hardware, radios, flight computers, sensors, and SDR platforms into program networks, while building observability and CI/CD integrated