Staff Engineer, Test Automation (R5792)

Telemetry Today LLC; San Diego, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI in San Diego seeks a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform.

This role defines and evolves test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines enabling the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms.

Qualifications

• Experience in automated verification across autonomy platforms.
• Strong Python automation and distributed-systems testing background.
• Leadership applying test automation to ML data/train/eval/deploy/monitor lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve test architecture and validation infrastructure.
• Lead cross-functional automation initiatives and establish standards.
• Collaborate across flight code, ML models, simulation, ground control, and data pipelines.

Skills

Python automation

Distributed testing

Technical leadership

CI/CD pipelines

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CI/CD tools

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 Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform. You will define and evolve test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines that enable the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments.

You will work across production flight code, machine learning models, simulation and synthetic environments, mission planning and orchestration systems, operator-facing Ground Control Station applications, telemetry and data pipelines, cloud-native developer infrastructure, and hardware-in-the-loop systems.

In this hands-on Staff role, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, establish automation and verification standards, identify systemic quality risks, and develop scalable test infrastructure. The ideal candidate combines deep Python automation and distributed-systems testing experience with technical leadership and experience validating machine learning systems throughout the data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.