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Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)

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), Hybrid (San Mateo, California)$167.5k - $251kFull Time EmployeePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior software engineer role developing and deploying state-of-the-art perception models for autonomous systems, bridging research and production across vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action capabilities.

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 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 4 years and a Master’s degree; or 2 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
  • Proficiency 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 visionPyTorchTensorFlowONNX / TensorRTC++Python3D vision algorithms

Benefits

  • Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
  • Temporary employee offer package: Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
  • 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.
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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