Autonomy Engineer - Behavior and Motion Planning

About the role

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company whose products include Hivemind autonomy software, aircraft and simulation technologies. The Pilot team builds the algorithms and production software that let intelligent systems decide what to do and how to do it in uncertain, dynamic environments. As part of the Behavior and Motion Planning team, you will develop, deploy and optimize path planning algorithms for autonomous systems in complex, real-world environments, collaborating with cross-functional teams to advance the Hivemind SDK.

Key responsibilities

• Research, design and implement state-of-the-art algorithms for autonomous trajectory planning and control for single and multi-agent systems.
• Build reliable, robust and maintainable software, primarily in modern C++, with Python used for prototyping, analysis, automation and testing.
• Develop comprehensive tests and evaluate planning stack performance in simulation and, where applicable, on real hardware.
• Diagnose complex algorithmic and software failures, including concurrency, performance and integration issues.
• Collaborate with teams across the organization to refine requirements and deliver capabilities that meet operational needs.
• Contribute to the design and architecture of scalable autonomy and software architectures.
• Take new product features from ideation through verification, flight testing and maturation.
• Mentor and give technical guidance to junior engineers.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, applied mathematics, operations research or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated experience building, testing and debugging nontrivial C++ software for optimization, motion planning, robotics or autonomous systems.
• Experience writing and debugging modern C++ and using Python for prototyping, analysis or testing.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, version control, CI/CD and maintainable design.
• Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
• For senior-level candidates: Master's degree in computer science, robotics or a related field and 5+ years of relevant experience, or PhD with 4+ years of relevant experience.

Required skills

• Modern C++ and Python
• Linux development
• Version control and CI/CD
• Behavior and motion planning, multi-agent planning, trajectory optimization
• Optimization solvers such as Gurobi, OR-Tools or CPLEX (stand out)
• Vision-language models or vision-language-action models (stand out)