What you'll do:
- Own the technical direction and ensure the product architecture fulfills mission needs and system constraints.
- Translate user and stakeholder requirements into verifiable system capabilities with defined margins and measures.
- Lead cross-discipline integration, ensuring mechanical, electrical, software, and test teams deliver a coherent design.
- Drive risk reduction and test strategy—plan, prioritize, and execute early demos and stress-to-failure tests.
- Maintain the functional baseline and verify that each subsystem meets its allocated performance and interface requirements.
- Guide trade studies balancing performance, cost, schedule, manufacturability, and reliability.
- Ensure analytical models are correlated to test data, closing the loop between simulation and experiment.
- Control the technical baseline and configuration, approving major design and requirement changes.
- Chair or support technical reviews (PDR, CDR, TRR) and enforce closure of open actions.
- Own the risk register, quantify technical and programmatic risk, and ensure mitigation plans are executable and tracked.
- Serve as the single point of technical accountability to leadership and customers.
- Define and maintain verification and validation (V&V) plans that trace requirements to tests and results.
- Communicate technical status using transparent, quantitative metrics on performance, maturity, and uncertainty.
- Integrate product development with manufacturing and sustainment to ensure designs are buildable and supportable.
- Foster a disciplined, data-driven engineering culture that values early learning, iteration, and truth-seeking.
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Physics, or related field (Mechanical/Aerospace ideal).
- 10+ years leading multidisciplinary engineering teams delivering complex electro-mechanical or automation systems.
- Proven record of owning system performance from requirements through test and field validation
- Strong systems engineering discipline — requirements traceability, margins, and verification planning.
- Skilled in risk-based decision-making and tradeoffs across performance, cost, and schedule
- Broad technical fluency across mechanical, electrical, software, and controls domains.
- Experience managing product lifecycle: design, build, integration, and test.
- Comfortable leading technical reviews (PDR, CDR, TRR, FRR) and closing actions to standard.
- Effective at cross-functional coordination with manufacturing, test, and operations.
- Clear communicator — able to translate technical reality to executive and customer audiences.
What the Team is Saying
Shield AI Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Company materials describe excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage alongside a mental‑health EAP. Site perks such as an onsite gym in DC and a gym discount in San Diego support a health‑focused offering.
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Retirement Support — Careers materials highlight a 401(k) with company match as part of the standard package. A Total Rewards overview emphasizes retirement features within a broader, transparent compensation view.
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Career-Linked Recognition & Rewards — Compensation for in‑demand technical and senior go‑to‑market roles is described as competitive, with visible engineering ranges and top‑end packages. This points to meaningful upside tied to role, level, and scarce skills.
Shield AI Insights
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What We Do
At Shield AI, you won't wait years to see your work reach the field. You'll build hardware and software that operates in the real world right now, in the hands of the people who depend on it. Hivemind, our AI pilot, has been flying since 2018. It has flown more than 30 platforms, including an F-16, and it now sits under a U.S. Air Force production contract for Collaborative Combat Aircraft. When you write code or shape a system here, you contribute to technology with a proven flight record and a clear production future. V-BAT flies intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions with an operational record that stretches from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific. It delivers eyes where they matter most, in the most demanding conditions on earth. The teams behind it watch their work get tested where the stakes are real. X-BAT takes its first flight this year. It's an AI-piloted fighter that needs no runway, built to operate where traditional aircraft can't. Join now and you help shape a program at its earliest, most formative stage. That's the kind of ground-floor work that defines a career. Do the most impactful work of your life, on problems that matter. Autonomy at this level asks a lot of you. You'll take on problems in perception, planning, and control that few teams anywhere are equipped to solve. You'll work across disciplines, from aerospace and robotics to machine learning and systems engineering, alongside people who hold themselves to an exacting standard and expect the same from you. Our mission is clear: protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. That purpose runs through every decision, every design review, and every deployment. It's why the work here carries a weight you can feel. Ready to join our mission? Explore our open roles and find where you fit.
Why Work With Us
Founded in 2015 by a former Navy SEAL, Shield AI builds AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft. Veterans aren't an afterthought here, they're at every level. It's why the work carries weight: AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft flying real missions, from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific, protecting service members and civilians.
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Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
