Workplace
On-site
Employment
Full-Time
Published
Apr 29, 2026
Closes
No date supplied
The role
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. About The Team The Autonomy Capabilities team at Shield AI has assembled a diverse team of experts in software, robotics, control systems, optimization, and data analysis to create software solutions that greatly evolve the capabilities of our customers. The team is responsible for developing autonomous behaviors within Shield AI’s industry-leading mission autonomy software stack and deploying them across a breadth of platforms, including the Anduril Fury, Northrup Grumman Talon, Shield AI V-Bat, and other first- and third-party autonomous vehicles. We work in close coordination with specialist teams in software integration, hardware, and test engineering to solve some of the hardest problems facing our customers.
Requirements
About the Job:: Staff Software Engineers on the Autonomy Behaviors team will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviors into our products, acting as technical leads, extremely senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect Staff Engineers to demonstrate unparalleled end-to-end outcome ownership, driving the architecting, design, delivery, support, and evolution of safe and effective mission autonomy software throughout the entire product lifecycle. What You'll Do:: Develop tactical autonomy software to enable unmanned platforms to perform complex missions across air, land, sea, and space domains with minimal human supervision Implement and test behaviors that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios Work throughout the entire of the software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilizing tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and to enable reuse of behaviors across multiple projects and portfolios Utilize your software and systems expertise to architect behaviors as scalable software subsystems, that may interact directly or indirectly with a breadth of system components (e.g., sensor processing, state estimation, peer-to-peer communications, contingency management, actuation, and payload interfacing) Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms (whether internally and externally owned), with a clear path towards architecture and capability evolution over time Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts (e.g., fighter pilots, UAV oper