Shield AI
Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)
$168K–$251K
Washington, D.C. +4 · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted Jul 28, 2026
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
Dallas, Texas
San Diego, California
Boston, Massachusetts
San Mateo, California - Experience
- Typically 5 years with a Bachelor’s degree, 4 years with a Master’s degree, or 2 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, or PhD, with the stated experience alternatives; or equivalent work experience.
About the job
Develops, trains, evaluates, and deploys production-ready perception models for autonomous systems, from research through integration on embedded platforms.
What you'll do
- Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models; build data pipelines and evaluation workflows.
- Deploy and optimize models for embedded hardware, and develop benchmarks to assess performance and identify failure modes.
- Collaborate across perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams to integrate reliable ML capabilities into autonomous systems.
What they ask for
- Training and deploying computer-vision ML models in production; strong understanding of 3D vision.
- Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
- Expertise deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX; proficiency in C++ and Python.
- Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance; proficiency in machine learning fundamentals.
Nice to have
- Experience developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
- Experience with vision-language, vision-language-action, or world models; open-source contributions or relevant publications.
Pay
USD 167,500–251,000 (per-year-salary) base salary
Tools
PyTorch, TensorFlow, TensorRT, ONNX, C++, Python
AI focus
Develops vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for perception and decision-making in autonomous systems.
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