Shield AI
Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)
San Diego, California · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Nov 2, 2026
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Integrates autonomy components into reference implementations and verifies and deploys the integrated software stack on representative hardware.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain integration implementations, configurations, test fixtures, and end-to-end examples; coordinate with component teams to maintain the integration baseline.
- Develop automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests, and troubleshoot failures across system boundaries.
- Support hardware deployment and flight test events; maintain setup guides, runbooks, and executable examples.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated experience building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software in a related algorithmic domain.
- Experience with modern C++, including concurrency patterns and diagnosing data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors.
- Working experience with Python and practical software development and debugging on Linux.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals; practical experience with build or dependency management systems such as Conan or Nix.
Nice to have
- Master’s degree in AI, Computer Science, Robotics, or similar; breadth across the autonomy stack or multi-agent autonomy.
- Experience with VLMs or VLAs, fielded or safety-critical autonomous systems, software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop simulation, performance profiling, or distributed systems.
Tools
C++, Python, Linux, Conan, Nix
AI focus
Develops and integrates AI/autonomy software for edge systems to perceive, reason, and act toward mission objectives; preferred experience includes applying VLMs or VLAs to planning, reasoning, tool use, or autonomous decision-making.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative