Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)

Shield AI•San Diego, CA

About The Position

The Hivemind Pilot group in Hivemind Enterprise org builds algorithms and production platform-agnostic AI/autonomy software that enable teams of edge systems to perceive, reason and act toward achieving mission objectives in complex and dynamic mission environments. Our work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and real-time autonomous systems. As an Autonomy Integration Lead, you will be responsible for bringing together various autonomy components into integrated reference implementations that enable targeted concept of operations, and taking these through software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop verification. You will draw on your breadth in autonomy to ensure harmonious execution of all autonomy components for effective mission enablement.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience through professional work, internships, research, or substantial projects building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for perception, planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or a closely related algorithmic domain.
Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including safe use of common concurrency patterns and the ability to diagnose issues such as data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors.
Working experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, and maintainable software design.
Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
Practical experience working with build / dependency management systems such as Conan or Nix.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in AI. Computer Science, Robotics or similar.
Breadth of experience across the autonomy stack (Perception, Localization and Planning).
Experience with multi-agent autonomy
Experience applying VLMs or VLAs to planning, reasoning, tool use, or autonomous decision-making.
Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained autonomous systems.
Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop simulation, performance profiling, or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain stable Pilot integrated implementations, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples.
Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility.
Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components.
Develop and maintain glue layer between mission autonomy software and platform software for easy integration and deployment of the stack.
Investigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required.
Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging.
Work with the Flight Operations team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward.
Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples.
Contribute technical material to Pilot training.