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Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)

Shield AI· Hivemind Enterprise Division – Engineering
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San Diego, California$230k - $350kFull Time EmployeePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior staff role leading integration of autonomy components into reference implementations, enabling mission-focused autonomy across edge systems, with software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop verification.

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain stable Pilot integrated implementations, 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.
  • Develop and maintain glue layer between mission autonomy software and platform software for easy integration and deployment of the 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.
  • 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 Operations 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.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Demonstrated experience building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for perception, planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or a closely related algorithmic domain.
  • Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including safe use of common concurrency patterns and diagnosing data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors.
  • Working experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, and maintainable software design.
  • Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
  • Practical experience with build/dependency management systems such as Conan or Nix.

Skills

Required:C++ (modern)PythonLinuxBuild/dependency management (Conan or Nix)

Benefits

  • Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
  • Temporary employee offer package with temporary benefits after 60 days of employment
  • Salary compensation influenced by skill set, experience, licenses/certifications, and location; background check required; military fellows/part-time 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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