Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration – Expeditionary (R5208)

Shield AI; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a leader to deliver autonomous flight capabilities for expeditionary platforms. The role focuses on integrating flight-autonomy interfaces, advanced payloads, and mission autonomy across V-BAT and X-BAT platforms.

You will mentor engineers, coordinate with Aircraft, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, and GCS teams, and drive readiness for customer releases in collaboration with defense customers.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical delivery of complex autonomy capabilities.
• Ability to define flight-autonomy interfaces and integrate advanced payloads.
• Experience collaborating with Aircraft, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, and GCS teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery of autonomy capabilities spanning platform integration and mission autonomy.
• Own flight-autonomy interfaces and integration of advanced payloads for expeditionary platforms.
• Drive mission readiness for customer releases and field deployments.
• Mentor engineers and improve engineering practices across the Expeditionary portfolio.

Job description

Founded in 2015, 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 and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. 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 Autonomous Pilot Integration team for expeditionary platforms builds autonomy solutions for V-BAT — an unmanned aircraft operating in expeditionary environments for ISR, target acquisition, communications, and multi-agent missions. The team also builds autonomy for X-BAT, a new platform under development by the aircraft team; for X-BAT, the team builds on top of the existing mission autonomy solution from the Strategic Systems (ACP) portfolio and works closely with the aircraft team on the flight-autonomy interface. We combine capabilities from the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team (e.g., ViDAR, ATR), and the HivemindSDK to develop the autonomy software that runs on these platforms, then integrate, validate, and field it on the real hardware — for U.S. and international defense customers.

In this role, you'll lead the technical delivery of complex autonomy capabilities spanning platform integration, mission autonomy, and operational deployment. You'll own some of the team's most challenging technical problems—from defining flight-autonomy interfaces and integrating advanced payloads to driving mission readiness for customer releases. You'll influence technical direction across multiple subsystems while partnering closely with the Aircraft team, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, GCS, Strategic Systems (ACP), feature crews, and customer stakeholders.

You'll combine deep technical expertise with systems thinking to drive successful integration across software, hardware, and operations while mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices across the Expeditionary portfolio.