We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability to build the tools that help engineers develop, understand, and diagnose complex software systems.
You will work close to the systems our engineers are building, developing tooling that makes those systems easier to understand and work with. This includes C++ and Python applications, developer-facing observability, web services, React-based user interfaces, visualisations, and engineering workflows.
A major focus of the role is developer-facing observability. Bringing together logs, telemetry, events, faults, and system state so engineers can quickly move from "something went wrong" to "I understand what happened and where to investigate."
You will be comfortable working within complex C++ software systems and understanding how they behave, while looking for opportunities to turn that understanding into better tools for other engineers. This could mean understanding how a component exposes diagnostic information, building services that aggregate it, or designing how that information should be presented to an engineer investigating a problem.
The role sits at the intersection of systems software, developer experience, observability, and engineering tooling. We treat internal tooling as a product. Usability, reliability, maintainability, performance, and the experience of the engineers using it all matter.
Our scope is focused on internal tooling products, Developer Experience, engineering-facing web services, UI/UX for system tooling, and licensing services. This is not a general DevOps or CI/CD engineering role. CI/CD platforms, build and release automation, pipeline infrastructure, build performance, and test execution pipelines sit outside the team's scope.
What you'll do:
- Design, build, and maintain engineering tools that help developers understand and diagnose complex software systems.
- Build tooling that brings together logs, telemetry, events, faults, diagnostics, and system state to make system behaviour easier to investigate.
- Build C++ and Python applications, libraries, services, and integrations that interact with complex onboard and distributed software systems.
- Create tools that correlate information across software components, processes, and machines to help engineers understand what happened and where to investigate.
- Build user interfaces and interactive visualisations using React and modern web technologies to explore system behaviour and engineering data.
- Design effective workflows for debugging, fault investigation, system introspection, and engineering analysis.
- Develop APIs and web services that support engineering tooling products and expose system data in useful ways.
- Improve the Developer Experience (DX) of working with complex systems by identifying engineering friction and turning it into effective tooling.
- Work directly with software, autonomy, systems, and test engineers to identify high-value problems and develop practical solutions.
- Treat internal tooling as a product, incorporating feedback from engineers and continuously improving usability and effectiveness.
- Establish reusable UI components, UX patterns, libraries, and engineering standards for system tooling.
- Contribute to the architecture and technical direction of the Engineering Tooling capability.
Required qualifications:
- Strong software engineering experience with modern C++, ideally C++17/20 or later.
- Strong Python development experience.
- Experience debugging and reasoning about complex, concurrent, distributed, or component-based software systems.
- Experience designing and maintaining production-quality software, libraries, services, APIs, or applications.
- Strong understanding of software architecture and the ability to navigate and reason about large codebases.
- Experience building tools for software engineers or other technical users.
- Experience working with logs, telemetry, metrics, events, traces, faults, or other diagnostic data.
- Ability to reason about behaviour across multiple software components and correlate information from different sources.
- Strong Linux development and debugging skills.
- Experience designing APIs, services, and software interfaces.
- Ability to independently identify engineering problems worth solving and turn ambiguous needs into practical, reliable tooling.
- Ability to make sound architectural decisions and collaborate effectively across engineering teams.
- Strong software engineering practices, including testing, code review, maintainability, documentation, and performance awareness.
- A product mindset toward internal engineering tools, with attention to usability and developer experience.
- Experience with React, TypeScript, and modern web application development.
- Experience with robotics, autonomous systems, embedded systems, or other complex physical systems.
- Experience with interactive data visualisation and presenting complex engineering data effectively.
- Experience with time-series, event, telemetry, or other high-volume engineering data systems.
- Experience with distributed systems and messaging architectures.
- Systems programming experience, including networking, IPC, and communication protocols.
- Experience designing UI/UX for technical or engineering applications.
- Experience developing desktop engineering applications.
- Experience analysing large-scale telemetry or diagnostic datasets.
Skills Required
- Minimum 7 years of systems engineering or related experience with a Bachelor's degree, 5 years with a Master's degree, 2 years with a PhD, or equivalent practical experience
- Bachelor of Science degree in a STEM field such as Systems, Software, Aerospace, Mechanical, or Electrical Engineering
- Experience with systems engineering practices, including writing, structuring, and verifying requirements
- Experience with Model-Based Systems Engineering and system-modeling workflows
- Experience working on cross-functional technical teams
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Highly organized, methodical, and comfortable managing detailed technical information
- Ability to read, interpret, and apply engineering drawings, assembly diagrams, parts lists, wiring diagrams, and schematics
- Demonstrated integrity, high standards, teamwork, and professionalism
What the Team is Saying
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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Shield AI Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
