Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy and Motion Planning (R5538)

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.

This position on the Autonomy team in the UK will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviours into our products, acting as technical leads, senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect candidates 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 behaviours that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios.
• Work throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilising tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development.
• Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and to enable reuse of behaviours across multiple projects and portfolios.
• Utilise your software and systems expertise to architect behaviours 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 operators, etc.).
• Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment including engineering, business and sales leadership.
• Travel to co-locate with end-users and/or other teams up to 20% of the time.

Required qualifications:

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Proficient in production-level C++ software development.
• 7+ years' experience in one or more of the following: software sub-system scheduling and integration, behaviour planning, task and resource allocation, motion planning, optimisation, or flight controls.
• Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management.
• Proven ability to lead multi-disciplinary teams, set technical direction, and manage full project lifecycles from concept to deployment.
• Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity.
• Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast-paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment.
• Capacity to act as the technical owner for an entire software system, including stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, roadmap management, team coordination, design, implementation, sustainment, and evolution.
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready.
• Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations.
• Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to: Collaborative mission planning, behaviour planning, synchronized teaming, automated red force vs blue force tactics, motion planning across a variety of vehicle classes, kinematic constraints, and team compositions, weapons target assignment, sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws, collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring.
• Experience in more than one operational effect (e.g., strike, air combat, surveillance, reconnaissance, etc.) and more than one associated domain (e.g., air, space, maritime, ground, etc.).
• Experience with FOSS software that is commonly used in robotic systems (e.g., ROS, OMPL, optimisation solvers, etc.).
• Experience with simulation tools and environments (e.g., AFSIM, NGTS) for testing and validation.
• Familiarity with practical aspects of navigation and communications systems.
• Experience across the product delivery lifecycle, from emerging opportunity through system acceptance, deployment, and sustainment.
• Familiarity with systems engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with high-assurance software development processes (e.g., DO-178C or equivalent MIL-STD's).