Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and 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.
Job Description:
This role is the team's primary interface between perception software and the flight test enterprise. You will work alongside autonomy/perception software developers, flight test engineers, and platform integration teams to mature our capabilities from algorithm to flight-verified system. The ideal candidate brings hands-on experience deploying and testing autonomy or perception software on edge hardware, a strong foundation in one or more core perception disciplines (detection, tracking, SLAM, or navigation), and a bias toward field execution over theoretical analysis.
What you'll do:
- Coordinate software and hardware integration activities that enable the autonomy team to deploy and test their stack across a range of platforms, including small UAS, manned fixed-wing aircraft, and unmanned fixed-wing surrogate platforms.
- Drive sensor selection for EO/IR and A-PNT perception software testing on operationally relevant or surrogate platforms; support flight test engineers in sensor bring-up, characterization, calibration, and maintenance.
- Own the fly-fix-fly cycle for autonomy and perception software: integrate the Hivemind Pilot stack onto target hardware, verify correct deployment and configuration, define test objectives for flight test campaigns, help execute tests in the field, and analyze collected data to determine pass/fail status against objectives.
- Own sensor calibration and time synchronization processes for all A-PNT and perception sensors used in testing, including camera intrinsic/extrinsic calibration and camera-IMU temporal alignment.
- Establish data quality standards and curate data management processes for field-collected sensor data, ensuring that recordings from flight test campaigns are usable for offline analysis and algorithm development.
- Resolve technical and logistical ambiguities at the boundary between software development and flight test operations, and make command decisions that keep perception maturation efforts moving forward.
Required qualifications:
- Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.