Staff Autonomy Engineer, Planning and Controls (R2879)

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world’s best AI pilot. Its AI pilot, Hivemind, has flown a fighter jet (F-16), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (V-BAT), and a quadcopter (Nova). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington DC and abroad. Shield AI’s products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies.

The Planning and Controls (PAC) team is an agile group of engineers focused on researching and developing state-of-the-art algorithms that drive intelligent and confidence-inspiring flight behaviors while accounting for an uncertain and dynamic world. As a member of PAC, you will work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, task & motion planning, and controls. You will architect and write high quality software for core systems, set standards for software engineering, refine technical requirements, drive strategic technical improvements, and mentor other engineers. 

What you'll do:

• Research, design, and implement state of the art teaming algorithms for real time autonomous systems 
• Develop core systems that must be portable and scalable across different UAS platforms and compute architectures 
• Work with our engineers, program managers, and product managers to define a technical roadmap for future autonomy solutions. 
• Work with soft or hard real-time operating systems 
• Work with and deploy our AI stack to edge devices 
• Collaborate with our DevOps teams to architect and maintain our cloud infrastructure (Docker and Kubernetes) and assist with cross-platform builds for a variety of architectures (e.g. Arm, X86, CMake, Bazel, gcc, llvm, etc.)

Projects you might work on:

• A Multi Agent Executive Manager for heterogeneous teams, which allocates members of flight wings to real-time emergent tasks. 
• State of the art assignment, planning, or scheduling algorithms to vastly reduce operator overhead or operate in denied environments autonomously. 
• NATO system interoperability and command chains for our autonomous vehicles 
• End to end simulation and analysis for software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing and continuous integration.

Required qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Proficient with C++ 11 or newer in a production environment 
• Experience in a collaborative development environment, focused on continuous integration/delivery & test-driven development 
• Strong knowledge of modern software engineering best practices 
• Demonstrated record of working hard, strong communication skills, being a trustworthy teammate, and being kind to others 
• Strong organizational skills 

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