Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245)

Shield AI•San Diego, CA

15h

About The Position

Shield AI is hiring a Principal Engineer to lead the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of its edge application platform for autonomous systems. The platform connects operators, autonomous platforms, mission data, and external command-and-control systems, supporting use cases from single-vehicle ground control to coordinated fleet operations and theater-level mission planning and execution. The role covers ground control stations (GCS), command and control (C2), battle-management system (BMS) integration, fleet and configuration management, and agentic workflows for planning, supervising, and managing autonomous robotic systems. The technical lead will combine defense-domain expertise with strong software engineering judgment and a record of delivering operational products. The role remains hands-on in architecture, critical implementation, and technical problem-solving while aligning engineering teams, product leaders, customers, and other stakeholders around a technical roadmap. It also entails leading customer integration, testing, acceptance, deployment, and sustainment, then using field experience and feedback to improve future releases.

Requirements

15+ years of professional software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of technical depth and impact, including substantial responsibility for complex production systems.
5+ years of technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent, with influence across multiple teams and ownership of significant architectural decisions.
Deep experience developing defense GCS and C2 applications, with working knowledge of mission planning, mission execution, operator workflows, and integration with broader battle-management environments.
Demonstrated record of shipping and sustaining software products for defense customers, including responsibility for operational deployment, customer acceptance, and improvements informed by field use.
Strong software architecture and implementation skills across distributed systems, application services, APIs, data management, and operator-facing software.
Experience building extensible platforms used by multiple teams and external customers, including interface design, reusable capabilities, versioning, and integration across organizational boundaries.
Experience with autonomous robotics applications, including fleet operations, configuration management, telemetry, and interactions between ground applications and platform-side autonomy.
Strong understanding of networked systems and edge deployments, including performance, reliability, security, and behavior under limited or interrupted connectivity.
Ability to translate ambiguous customer and stakeholder needs into technical roadmaps, executable plans, and delivered capabilities; excellent written and verbal communication.
Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience developing or integrating platforms such as Lattice, other extensible defense C2/BMS products, or comparable mission-management systems.
Experience with multi-domain operations, heterogeneous autonomous fleets, and the relationship between tactical GCS applications and higher-echelon mission systems.
Experience delivering agentic or AI-assisted applications, including workflow orchestration, human-machine teaming, evaluation, and operator supervision.
Experience with geospatial applications, common operational pictures, mission rehearsal, telemetry replay, or post-mission analysis.
Experience with secure software delivery into defense environments, including collaboration with cybersecurity and authorization teams.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve architecture across operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces, and edge deployment environments, establishing boundaries that enable independent team delivery within a coherent product.
Guide mission applications from single-vehicle GCS workflows to multi-vehicle supervision, heterogeneous fleet operations, and theater-level planning, execution monitoring, and battlespace management.
Make customer extensibility a core capability by establishing APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, and integration tooling.
Preserve compatibility as the platform evolves.
Lead C2 and BMS interoperability with external mission systems and comparable defense C2 environments, including aggregation and exchange of vehicle state, mission information, sensor-derived data, and operational context.
Partner with autonomy, AI, product, and design teams on operator planning, supervision, execution, and debrief experiences; define authority, approval boundaries, observability, and evaluation criteria for AI-assisted workflows.
Own fleet and configuration architecture, including asset inventory, readiness and health monitoring, software and configuration versioning, compatibility management, controlled updates, rollback, and traceability.
Design edge applications for contested environments with intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, distributed state, and partial-failure recovery, ensuring useful and predictable behavior in disconnected or degraded environments.
Translate product strategy, customer needs, and operational feedback into architectural priorities, milestones, and measurable deliverables; resolve dependencies and make tradeoffs among delivery, platform investment, reliability, and technical debt.
Partner with integration, test, field, and customer teams from requirements through acceptance, deployment, and sustainment, using field experience, telemetry, and customer feedback to improve subsequent releases.