Staff Engineer, Hivemind Reasoning for Autonomy

Shield; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer to advance reasoning models for unmanned autonomous systems. You will lead design, training, and evaluation of cognition models for edge deployments on aerial, maritime, land, and space platforms.

Collaborate with perception, MLOps, simulation, and autonomy teams to deliver capabilities within Hivemind Enterprise, balancing compute limits and unreliable communications.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proven track record of developing and deploying advanced ML models in production.
• Deep expertise in foundation models and modern DL techniques.
• Experience with training frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow.
• Experience with multimodal or autonomous-system models; VLA familiarity is a plus.
• Familiarity with edge compute platforms (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson).

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, train, adapt, and evaluate reasoning models for unmanned platforms.
• Trade off foundation-model approaches, including VLMs and VLAs, and traditional ML methods.
• Develop context interpretation and time-based reasoning across many agents.
• Create reproducible training workflows using self-supervised, supervised, RL, and distillation.
• Define data needs, objectives, benchmarks, and evaluation criteria.
• Establish evaluations in simulation and with real-world data across varying team sizes.
• Integrate edge constraints into model design with hardware and inference teams.
• Diagnose failures and feed insights back to data curation and experiments.
• Deliver trained models and evidence to partner teams.
• Communicate tradeoffs and findings to leadership across research, engineering, and product.

Skills

ML model design

Model training

Evaluation pipelines

Foundation models

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Edge AI

Unmanned systems

Reinforcement learning

Education

Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS/EE/ME/AE

Tools

NVIDIA Jetson

CUDA

Edge compute platforms

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer to advance reasoning models for unmanned autonomous systems. You will lead design, training, and evaluation of cognition models for edge deployments on aerial, maritime, land, and space platforms.

Collaborate with perception, MLOps, simulation, and autonomy teams to deliver capabilities within Hivemind Enterprise, balancing compute limits and unreliable communications.