Principal Technical Product Manager (R5249)

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. Job Description: The Special Projects team at Shield AI is an elite force within the office of the CTO. It consists of a group of very senior (L5-L8) and highly experienced software engineering experts from diverse fields (aerospace, robotics, cloud infrastructure, game development, interactive media design, ...). The charter of this group is to steer technology development towards strategic alignment with the CTO's vision, through tactical insertion into teams and technologies across the organization. Individuals within this team make direct and at times forward-sprinting contributions to all three pillars of Hivemind, Shield AI's software ecosystem for developing and deploying resilient intelligent teaming for aircrafts. Hivemind consists of four products: EdgeOS (C++ based high-performance middleware for autonomy development), Pilot (autonomy for the edge built atop EdgeOS; a models-based, modular and open architecture C++ codebase), Forge (Shield AI's AI Factory for the design, development, and testing of Hivemind Edge systems; a service-oriented architecture leveraged through an SDK, CLI, and web portal; a Go, Python, Typescript codebase), Commander (Software and hardware to support rich human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop interactions with the Hivemind; a C++-based back-end for interaction with Pilot; and a web-application UI for mission planning, command and control by operators implemented in a Typescript/React codebase). The Special Projec

What you'll do:: Own product definition, roadmap, and metrics across the office of the CTO's agentic AI portfolio: an enterprise knowledge assistant (Brain), an agent-driven engineering platform (Springboard), and enterprise AI/data modernization and app development. Translate CTO strategy into crisp requirements, milestones, exit criteria, and KPIs — then hold the line on them. Drive adoption of internal platforms: reduce onboarding friction, instrument usage, track NPS and active users, and run developer advocacy and objection handling. Shape product direction for foundation-model based autonomy architectures and model lifecycle tooling (evaluation, fine-tuning, verification, deployment). Run continuous discovery with engineers, operators, and executive stakeholders; turn findings into prioritized backlogs. Prioritize ruthlessly across competing initiatives with small teams and aggressive timelines. Analyze the agentic tooling, enterprise AI platform, and foundation model ecosystem; recommend build/buy/partner positions to leadership. Author strategy documents, product briefs, and executive updates that drive decisions. Manage transitions of maturing products from incubation to owning organizations. Required qualifications:: 8+ years of product management for deeply technical products; engineering or CS background. Technical fluency: you read code, work APIs and CLIs from a terminal, and prototype with AI coding tools yourself. Shipped developer tools, internal platforms, or AI/ML products — and drove their adoption. Working fluency in LLM-based systems: agents, evaluation, context management, fine-tuning trade-offs. Metrics-driven operating style: you define KPIs, instrument products, and report against thresholds and objectives. Exceptional written communication — requirements, strategy docs, executive briefs. Proven stakeholder management up to the executive level across engineering, product, and business functions. Fluid intelligence that allows one to operate