Staff Engineer, Test Automation (R5792)

Posted Yesterday
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San Diego, CA, USA
In-Office
150K-230K Annually
Senior level
Aerospace • Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • Robotics • Software
Our mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
The Role
Provides technical leadership for automated testing and verification across autonomy software, machine learning systems, distributed services, simulation environments, hardware-in-the-loop platforms, and GPU infrastructure. Owns test architecture, MLOps quality, CI/CD and continuous training workflows, ML validation, observability, failure triage, scenario-based testing, and scalable Python automation. Collaborates across software, autonomy, data, simulation, and systems engineering teams while governing AI-assisted testing workflows.
Summary Generated by Built In
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, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. 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:

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, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. 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.

The Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform. You will define and evolve test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines that enable the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments.

You will work across production flight code, machine learning models, simulation and synthetic environments, mission planning and orchestration systems, operator-facing Ground Control Station applications, telemetry and data pipelines, cloud-native developer infrastructure, and hardware-in-the-loop systems.

In this hands-on Staff role, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, establish automation and verification standards, identify systemic quality risks, and develop scalable test infrastructure. The ideal candidate combines deep Python automation and distributed-systems testing experience with technical leadership and experience validating machine learning systems throughout the data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.

What you'll do:

  • Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for automated testing, verification, and MLOps quality across the Hivemind ecosystem.
  • Design and maintain scalable test frameworks for autonomy software, backend services, APIs, operator-facing applications, and distributed hardware environments.
  • Lead functional, integration, regression, system, performance, reliability, and end-to-end testing across simulation, edge-compute, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
  • Build automated ML validation pipelines covering data quality, training reproducibility, model accuracy, robustness, regression, latency, resource utilization, and system integration.
  • Establish CI/CD and continuous training workflows that provide versioning and traceability for datasets, models, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment artifacts.
  • Develop scenario-based validation for autonomy models, including edge cases, degraded sensing or communications, distribution shifts, and representative mission conditions.
  • Create observability, analytics, and failure-triage capabilities for software behavior, model and data drift, inference health, test results, and production performance.
  • Build Python automation that improves test execution, parallelization, reporting, environment setup, experiment comparison, and developer productivity.
  • Create test harnesses, simulators, stubs, mocks, and synthetic data capabilities that improve system testability and coverage.
  • Collaborate with software, autonomy, machine learning, data, simulation, and systems engineers to define verification strategies and improve designs before implementation.
  • Develop and govern AI-assisted engineering workflows using coding agents and LLM-based tools for test generation, log analysis, debugging, and failure triage while maintaining security, reproducibility, and traceability.

Required qualifications:

  • Typically 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer tooling, MLOps, systems integration, or systems verification, or an equivalent combination of experience and demonstrated impact.
  • 5+ years of experience building scalable automation frameworks or developer tooling in Python.
  • Demonstrated success designing test, CI/CD, or MLOps infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
  • Experience validating machine learning systems across the data, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
  • Understanding of ML quality risks such as data leakage, training-serving skew, nondeterminism, distribution shift, drift, model regression, and statistical acceptance criteria.
  • Experience defining model-performance baselines, automated evaluation suites, release thresholds, and candidate-to-production comparison workflows.
  • Experience testing GPU-accelerated infrastructure and workloads, including GPU scheduling, allocation, utilization, and resource contention in Kubernetes environments.
  • Experience with performance benchmarking, profiling, and observability for GPU workloads, including identifying compute, memory, storage, networking, and data-loading bottlenecks.
  • Experience validating multi-tenant Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, resource quotas, workload isolation, and scheduling behavior.
  • Experience qualifying integrated hardware and software systems, including automated validation of compute, GPU, storage, networking, drivers, firmware, and deployed software configurations.
  • Strong system-design skills and experience testing distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and integrated hardware and software environments.
  • Experience developing integration and regression strategies for internally developed, third-party, open-source, and partner software, including dependency management, compatibility testing, and upgrades.
  • Strong understanding of asynchronous and concurrent Python programming for scalable automation and parallel test execution.
  • Experience with package and dependency management, reproducible environments, and build systems such as Conan, pip, setuptools, Poetry, Nix, or similar.
  • Experience with automated observability, log collection, analytics, reporting, and root-cause analysis in complex software, data, and infrastructure systems.
  • Experience working in Linux-based development environments.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience with model registries, experiment tracking, dataset or feature versioning, model serving, and automated artifact promotion using MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or similar platforms.
  • Experience with GPU scheduling and orchestration platforms such as Run:ai, NVIDIA GPU Operator, KAI Scheduler, Kueue, Volcano, or similar technologies.
  • Experience with NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, including CUDA, drivers, container runtimes, Multi-Instance GPU, GPU fractionalization, and hardware/software compatibility testing.
  • Experience with GPU profiling and performance-analysis tools such as NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, or similar technologies.
  • Experience validating perception, planning, decision-making, reinforcement learning, or other autonomy models in simulation and on deployed systems.
  • Experience testing models on embedded or edge-compute platforms, including latency, memory, power, accelerator compatibility, quantization, and hardware-specific behavior.
  • Experience qualifying production servers or appliances, including hardware validation, burn-in, provisioning, firmware, networking, storage, and software-stack validation before deployment.
  • Experience with reliability, fault-injection, and recovery testing across distributed compute, storage, networking, and GPU infrastructure.
  • Experience validating reproducible installation, operation, upgrades, and rollback in cloud, on-premises, disconnected, or air-gapped environments.
  • Experience with containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, and reproducible test environments.
  • Proficiency with Go or TypeScript for automation tooling or UI test development.
  • Experience integrating Python with native C or C++ applications through bindings, wrappers, subprocess interfaces, or similar interoperability tooling.
  • Aerospace, robotics, autonomy, embedded systems, or safety-critical software experience.
  • Familiarity with software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, requirements-based verification, configuration management, artifact traceability, or standards such as DO-178C and MIL-STD-882.

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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. 

Skills Required

  • Typically 8 or more years of relevant experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer tooling, MLOps, systems integration, or systems verification, or equivalent demonstrated impact.
  • At least 5 years of experience building scalable automation frameworks or developer tooling in Python.
  • Experience designing test, CI/CD, or MLOps infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
  • Experience validating machine learning systems across the data, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
  • Understanding of ML quality risks including data leakage, training-serving skew, nondeterminism, distribution shift, drift, model regression, and statistical acceptance criteria.
  • Experience defining model-performance baselines, automated evaluation suites, release thresholds, and candidate-to-production comparison workflows.
  • Experience testing GPU-accelerated infrastructure and workloads, including GPU scheduling, allocation, utilization, and resource contention in Kubernetes.
  • Experience with performance benchmarking, profiling, and observability for GPU workloads.
  • Experience validating multi-tenant Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, resource quotas, workload isolation, and scheduling behavior.
  • Experience qualifying integrated hardware and software systems, including compute, GPU, storage, networking, drivers, firmware, and deployed software configurations.
  • Strong system-design skills and experience testing distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and integrated hardware and software environments.
  • Experience developing integration and regression strategies for internal, third-party, open-source, and partner software, including dependency management, compatibility testing, and upgrades.
  • Strong understanding of asynchronous and concurrent Python programming for scalable automation and parallel test execution.
  • Experience with package and dependency management, reproducible environments, and build systems such as Conan, pip, setuptools, Poetry, Nix, or similar.
  • Experience with automated observability, log collection, analytics, reporting, and root-cause analysis in complex software, data, and infrastructure systems.
  • Experience working in Linux-based development environments.
  • Experience with model registries, experiment tracking, dataset or feature versioning, model serving, and automated artifact promotion using MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or similar platforms.
  • Experience with GPU scheduling and orchestration platforms such as Run:ai, NVIDIA GPU Operator, KAI Scheduler, Kueue, Volcano, or similar.
  • Experience with NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, including CUDA, drivers, container runtimes, Multi-Instance GPU, GPU fractionalization, and hardware/software compatibility testing.
  • Experience with GPU profiling and performance-analysis tools such as NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, or similar technologies.
  • Experience validating perception, planning, decision-making, reinforcement learning, or other autonomy models in simulation and deployed systems.
  • Experience testing models on embedded or edge-compute platforms, including latency, memory, power, accelerator compatibility, quantization, and hardware-specific behavior.
  • Experience qualifying production servers or appliances, including hardware validation, burn-in, provisioning, firmware, networking, storage, and software-stack validation.
  • Experience with reliability, fault-injection, and recovery testing across distributed compute, storage, networking, and GPU infrastructure.
  • Experience validating reproducible installation, operation, upgrades, and rollback in cloud, on-premises, disconnected, or air-gapped environments.
  • Experience with containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, and reproducible test environments.
  • Proficiency with Go or TypeScript for automation tooling or UI test development.
  • Experience integrating Python with native C or C++ applications through bindings, wrappers, subprocess interfaces, or similar interoperability tooling.
  • Aerospace, robotics, autonomy, embedded systems, or safety-critical software experience.
  • Familiarity with software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, requirements-based verification, configuration management, artifact traceability, DO-178C, or MIL-STD-882.

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The Company
HQ: San Diego, CA
Year Founded: 2015

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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