Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
The Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Senior Automated Test Engineer to design, develop, and scale advanced automated testing and CI/CD infrastructure for our next-generation autonomy platform. You will help develop test frameworks that enable this software ecosystem to create, test and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments. You will work with a robust suite of autonomy and mission software components, including production flight code, simulation and synthetic environment tooling, mission planning and orchestration systems, operator-facing Ground Control Station (GCS) applications, telemetry and data pipelines, and cloud-native developer infrastructure.
In this role, you will help ensure the reliability, scalability, and quality of the Hivemind ecosystem through advanced automation, validation infrastructure, and AI-assisted engineering workflows. You will develop automated test frameworks, CI/CD systems, and verification tooling that support distributed autonomy software spanning onboard edge compute, APIs, web-based operator interfaces, simulation environments, and hardware-in-the-loop systems. Working closely with software, autonomy, simulation, and systems engineering teams, you will contribute to a high-assurance development environment focused on mission-critical reliability, rapid iteration, and engineering excellence. The ideal candidate has strong experience in Python-based automation, distributed systems testing, developer tooling, and modern CI/CD practices, along with an interest in autonomy, aerospace, robotics, or safety-critical software systems. Experience leveraging AI-assisted development and intelligent automation tools to accelerate testing, debugging, analytics, and developer productivity is highly valued.
What You'll Do:
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Develop scalable automated test infrastructure for functional, integration, regression, system, and end-to-end testing across distributed software and hardware environments.
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Build workflow automation tools and utilities in Python to improve test execution efficiency, reporting, environment setup, and developer productivity.
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Collaborate closely with software, autonomy, simulation, and systems engineering teams to define verification strategies and improve software quality throughout the development lifecycle.
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Create test harnesses, simulators, stubs, and mocks to support automated verification in both simulated and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) environments.
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Improve test coverage, execution speed, maintainability, and observability of automated test systems.
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Maintain clear technical documentation for test frameworks, automation workflows, CI/CD infrastructure, and validation procedures.
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Develop AI-assisted engineering workflows and analytics tools using modern coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and related LLM-based development platforms to improve test generation, failure triage, debugging, and developer productivity.
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Design intelligent automation pipelines that leverage AI-assisted code generation, log analysis, test analysis, and workflow orchestration to accelerate software verification and validation processes.
Required Qualifications:
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5+ years of experience working with package management, dependency management, and build systems using tools such as conan, pip, setuptools, poetry, and nix or similar.
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5+ years of experience building tooling for automated log collection, analytics, reporting, and failure triage.
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Experience with automated testing of distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and web-based UIs.
Preferred Qualifications:
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Experience integrating Python with native C/C++ libraries and applications using bindings, wrappers, subprocess interfaces, or interoperability tooling.
Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
