Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035)

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.

What you'll do: • Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples.

• Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility. • Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components. • Integrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack. • Investigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required. • Develop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them. • Improve repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage. • Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging. • Work with the flight-test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward. • Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples. Contribute technical material to Pilot training. • Surface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems so that the responsible Pilot teams can make informed architectural decisions. • Improve integration quality by reducing integration defects and increasing end-to-end test readiness.

Required qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software. • Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python. • Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging. • Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests. • Experience developing and debugging software on Linux. • Strong systems-debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries. • Ability to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems. • Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines. • Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight-test events that may occur outside normal working hours.