Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)

f7d8749a-72d6-407c-bf98-292ea630c73a•San Diego, CA

About The Position

The Hivemind Pilot group in Shield AI’s Hivemind Enterprise organization builds algorithms and production, platform-agnostic AI and autonomy software that enables teams of edge systems to perceive, reason, and act toward mission objectives in complex, dynamic environments. The work spans artificial intelligence, robotics, and real-time autonomous systems. The Autonomy Integration Lead brings autonomy components together into integrated reference implementations for targeted concepts of operations and takes them through software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop verification. The role draws on broad autonomy expertise to ensure the components work together effectively for mission enablement. It also supports deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware and collaboration with Flight Operations on test preparation, execution, and follow-up.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent practical experience.
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 diagnosing 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 with build or dependency management systems such as Conan or Nix.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in AI, Computer Science, Robotics, or a similar field.
Breadth of experience across the autonomy stack, including 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 the glue layer between mission autonomy software and platform software to support integration and deployment of the stack.
Investigate failures across system boundaries by reproducing and instrumenting problems, isolating the responsible layer, fixing integration-owned defects, and providing the owning team with 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.
Drive strategy and implementation for a diverse set of autonomy reference integrations serving representative missions.
Develop workflows and tooling to enable seamless deployment of autonomy software on edge devices.
Develop documentation to help product users assemble custom autonomy integrations.