Manager, Dev Platform Engineering (R4979)

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. The Hivemind Development Platform team seeks to improve the development velocity of Hivemind teams and customers by building the core tooling, package management, build systems, and developer workflows used across the Hivemind SDK ecosystem. This team owns the customer-facing developer experience for installing, building, packaging, releasing, and consuming Hivemind SDK components. The team owns a standardized package manager built within Nix that is used to ship the SDK and enable customers to build their own packages against the SDK. This includes ownership of SDK package definitions, reproducible toolchains, target platforms, package distribution, developer environments, and the CLI experience. This also includes ownership of the licensing mechanism for developer seats and edge devices. The team also owns service-backed platform components including the build cluster service, telemetry and authentication services, and package hosting and distribution services. These services require clear operational ownership, reliability targets, observability, support workflows, and customer-facing expectations. The Hivemind Development Platform Manager will lead this team as they work with product teams, internal engineers, and customers to identify friction in SDK development workflows and turn those needs into scalable product-facing platform features and self-service capabilities. These decisions impact all Hivemind SDK users, both internal and external. This

What you'll do:: Lead and grow the Hivemind Development Platform team - coach and develop engineers, manage performance, and foster a culture of technical excellence, user empathy, ownership, and continuous improvement. Set strategic direction for the Hivemind developer platform, in partnership with Product, Architecture, Software Operations and engineering leadership. Own the developer platform roadmap, including SDK package management, Nix-based build infrastructure, developer environments, toolchains, target platforms, package distribution, and release workflows, including the operational readiness of service-backed components such as build clusters, package hosting, telemetry, authentication, and licensing. Own the customer-facing SDK developer experience, including how users install the SDK, activate licenses, pull packages, build their own packages, and integrate with supported target platforms. Drive cross-functional collaboration with Pilot, EdgeOS, Forge, SoftOps, and customer-facing teams to understand friction points and convert them into clear platform requirements. Oversee architecture decisions for the standardized Hivemind package manager, CLI, package repository services, toolchain definitions, and reproducible build environments with a practical understanding of distributed systems, service reliability, observability, and operational tradeoffs. Ensure the platform supports multi-language SDK development across C++, Python, Go, and TypeScript. Define metrics and signals for SDK developer productivity, package reliability, build reproducibility, release quality, and customer adoption. Represent the voice of SDK developers in engineering planning by championing ease-of-use, reproducibility, reliability, and clear ownership across the Hivemind ecosystem. Establish lightweight operational excellence practices for developer platform services, including ownership models, runbooks, monitoring and alerting, service-level expectations, incident response, esca