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Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R4985)

Shield AI· Hivemind Solutions Division – Flight System Integration
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Hybrid (Washington, D.C.), Hybrid (Dallas, Texas), Hybrid (San Diego, California), Hybrid (Boston, Massachusetts)$233.8k - $350.6kFull Time EmployeePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Hivemind Solutions Perception team, focusing on developing and deploying state-of-the-art perception models (vision, vision-language, vision-language-action) for autonomous systems, with emphasis on production deployment for defense customers.

Responsibilities

  • Model Development – Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models that improve perception and decision-making for autonomous systems.
  • Data Pipelines & Model Training – Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission-relevant tasks.
  • Model Deployment & Optimization – Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.
  • Perception & Autonomy Applications – Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments.
  • Research-to-Production – Translate cutting-edge machine learning research into production-ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.
  • Cross-functional Collaboration – Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission-ready autonomous systems.
  • Model Evaluation & Validation – Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.
  • Continuous Improvement – Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.

Qualifications

  • Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
  • Mastery of machine learning fundamentals.
  • Experience training an deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
  • Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
  • Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
  • Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
  • Proficiency in C++ and Python.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate research into practical applications.
  • Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance

Skills

Required:Machine learning fundamentalsComputer vision3D visionPyTorchTensorFlowONNXTensorRTC++PythonEmbedded hardware deploymentData pipelinesEvaluation frameworksResearch-to-production

Benefits

  • Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
  • Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits.
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Shield AI

Autonomy for the world.

Our mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.

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