Shield AI
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R4985)
$234K–$351K
Washington, D.C. +3 · On-site · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Jul 28, 2026
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
Dallas, Texas
San Diego, California
Boston, Massachusetts - Experience
- Typically 10 years with a Bachelor’s degree, 9 years with a Master’s degree, 7 years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, or PhD, according to the stated experience alternatives.
About the job
Develops and deploys production-ready vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for autonomous systems, including the data, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure that supports them.
What you'll do
- Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain perception models and workflows for mission-relevant tasks.
- Deploy and optimize models on embedded hardware; build evaluation methods and improve training and deployment infrastructure.
- Collaborate with research, perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams to integrate reliable ML capabilities into autonomous systems.
What they ask for
- Mastery of machine learning fundamentals and experience training and deploying computer-vision models in production.
- Strong understanding of 3D vision problems and algorithms.
- Expertise deploying models with TensorRT and ONNX; experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python; ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.
Nice to have
- Experience developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
- Experience training or fine-tuning vision-language, vision-language-action, or world models; open-source contributions or relevant publications.
Pay
USD 233,760–350,640 per-year-salary; base salary
Tools
ONNX, TensorRT, PyTorch, TensorFlow, C++, Python
AI focus
Develops vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for autonomous systems, including training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and embedded deployment.
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