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 nine 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.
As a Software Engineer on the Forge Platform Applications team, you will build the systems and tools that autonomy engineers use to develop, train, evaluate, and ship autonomy at scale. This role focuses on building AI-first developer tools and platform capabilities that make complex autonomy workflows usable, observable, and fast to iterate on.
This is not a research role or a pure infrastructure role. The work is hands on and end to end: shaping workflows, writing production backend services, and building visualization and analysis tooling that autonomy teams rely on. You will help define how engineers interact with data, training runs, simulations, orchestration systems, and evaluation outputs across the platform. This role is well suited for engineers excited about autonomous systems who want to contribute tools used throughout the autonomy development lifecycle.
What You'll Do:
- Design and implement backend services, APIs, and workflows that support autonomy development, including learning, evaluation, simulation, and operational analysis.
- Build and operate systems for orchestrating jobs and tasks across distributed environments, including containerized and clustered execution.
- Approach feature development from an AI-first perspective, designing tools around how autonomy engineers reason about data, models, performance, and failure modes.
- Develop tooling and interfaces that visualize and make sense of high dimensional, time varying autonomy data such as telemetry, live outputs, learning artifacts, and simulation results.
- Contribute to notebook driven and analysis oriented workflows that support experimentation, debugging, and iteration.
- Collaborate with product, customer engagement, autonomy, and platform teams to refine workflows and tooling based on operational feedback and evolving user needs.
- Own features from design through delivery, with a strong bias toward usability, clarity, and iteration speed.
- Improve reliability and developer experience through testing, documentation, examples, and thoughtful system design.
Required Qualifications:
- Strong understanding of reinforcement learning workflows end to end, preferably in robotics or autonomy contexts.
- Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production backend systems.
- Fluency in backend development, including API design, service ownership, and data modeling.
- Experience building or operating task and job orchestration systems for data or ML workloads.
- Deep care for developer experience and user experience when building internal platforms or developer tools.
- Ability to take initiative, move quickly, and operate effectively in a fast paced environment.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with Go in production systems.
- Experience with containerized and distributed systems such as Docker, Kubernetes, or similar orchestration platforms.
- Comfort with notebook based workflows for experimentation, analysis, and debugging.
- Background in startups or early stage teams, including founder or founding engineer experience.
- Experience building visualization heavy or analysis oriented tooling for complex datasets.
- Experience delivering software in constrained, secure, or operationally sensitive environments.
- Principal- $222,000-$333,000
- Senior Staff-$185,000-$278,000
- Staff- $156,000-$235,000
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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.
