Automated Test Engineer II

About the role

Shield AI, a defense-tech company, is hiring an Automated Test Engineer for its Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team in San Diego. The role designs, develops and scales automated testing and CI/CD infrastructure for an autonomy platform used by unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms in contested, GPS-denied environments. It works with autonomy, simulation, mission software, Ground Control Station applications, telemetry pipelines and cloud-native developer infrastructure.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain automated test frameworks for autonomy and UI applications.
• Build scalable test infrastructure for functional, integration, regression, system and end-to-end testing across distributed software and hardware.
• Create and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines using YAML and shell scripting.
• Build Python tools for test execution, reporting, environment setup and developer productivity.
• Develop UI and API test automation in Go and TypeScript.
• Integrate testing into continuous integration and collaborate with software, autonomy, simulation and systems engineering teams on verification strategies.
• Build validation solutions, test harnesses, simulators, stubs and mocks for simulated and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
• Analyze test results, troubleshoot failures and improve coverage, speed and observability.
• Maintain technical documentation and support release qualification and traceability between requirements, tests and results.
• Develop AI-assisted workflows and pipelines using coding agents and LLM-based tools to speed test generation, failure triage and debugging.

Required profile

• 2+ years building automation frameworks and developer tooling in Python.
• 2+ years with package and dependency management (conan, pip, setuptools, poetry, nix or similar).
• 2+ years building tools for log collection, analytics, reporting and failure triage.
• Experience with automated testing of distributed systems, backend services, APIs and web UIs.
• Linux-based development environment experience.
• Strong debugging, collaboration and communication skills.

Required skills

• Python, including asynchronous and concurrent programming
• GitLab CI, YAML and shell scripting
• Modern test frameworks and software quality methodologies
• Preferred: Go, TypeScript, C/C++, C++, simulation and HIL testing