Chief Engineer, Autonomy - Space Domain

About the role

Shield AI builds trusted autonomy for national-security space missions. The Chief Engineer, Autonomy - Space Domain is the senior technical authority responsible for defining, delivering and sustaining autonomy capabilities that turn distributed space, ground and payload resources into timely, decision-quality data products. The role covers the full lifecycle, from concept development through integration, test, launch and commissioning support, on-orbit operations, software updates and mission evolution. It is not a research position.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as senior technical authority for space-domain autonomy, accountable for mission architecture, software and system design, product quality, technical risk, verification evidence and customer confidence.
• Define an autonomy architecture covering tasking, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination across satellites, payloads, ground systems, communications networks, cloud/edge compute and data sources.
• Lead automatic and autonomous behaviors for multi-constellation and multi-orbit tasking, including prioritization, scheduling, replanning, resource allocation and conflict resolution.
• Define approaches for autonomous selection, cueing and coordination of collection from payload classes such as EO/IR, SAR, RF, SIGINT, communications, navigation and partner payloads.
• Architect hybrid on-board and off-board processing, setting decision criteria for inference, fusion, storage and dissemination under latency, bandwidth, power and security constraints.
• Lead design of exploitation capabilities such as sensor fusion, event detection, anomaly detection, provenance, confidence estimation and analyst-in-the-loop workflows.
• Own dissemination of mission products, including data formats, interfaces, routing, quality metadata, access control and machine-to-machine integration.
• Establish interfaces among spacecraft buses, payloads, avionics, flight software, ground control, cloud infrastructure and customer applications.
• Drive technical rigor across requirements, CONOPS, architecture, ICDs, trade studies, test plans, verification matrices and technical baselines.
• Lead technical readiness for milestone reviews, test-readiness reviews, demonstrations, launch readiness, commissioning, on-orbit assessments and customer acceptance.
• Run a verification and validation strategy combining modeling and simulation, digital engineering, software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, mission rehearsal, operational test and on-orbit validation.
• Identify and manage autonomy risks such as sensor failure, link loss, data issues, resource exhaustion, model uncertainty, interface failures, cyber compromise and unsafe automated action.
• Partner with product, program, mission operations, security, safety, payload, spacecraft, ground, cloud and data-engineering leaders, and act as senior technical counterpart to government customers and partners.
• Build and mentor a technical organization including staff engineers, autonomy developers, mission planners, data/ML engineers, test engineers and domain experts.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, aerospace engineering, electrical/computer engineering, systems engineering, applied mathematics, robotics, physics or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
• 12+ years of progressively responsible experience in autonomy, space systems, aerospace, robotics, mission systems, ISR, satellite operations, distributed systems or comparable fields.
• Demonstrated experience as a Chief Engineer, Lead Systems Engineer, Technical Director, Principal/Distinguished Engineer, IPT lead or equivalent senior technical leader.
• Significant experience designing, developing, integrating, testing and operating software-intensive mission systems with high reliability, mission assurance or certifiability requirements.

Required skills

• Autonomous planning, scheduling, optimization, decision-making and multi-agent coordination.
• Space mission planning, satellite ground systems, constellation operations and multi-orbit tasking.
• Embedded, edge, ground, cloud and hybrid compute architectures.
• On-board data processing, sensor fusion, payload control and communication-aware autonomy.
• ISR, remote sensing, RF, EO/IR, SAR, communications and navigation payloads.
• Data-product generation, provenance, quality assessment, dissemination, APIs and mission-data integration.
• Systems engineering: requirements, CONOPS, architecture, ICDs, trade studies, verification planning, technical reviews and risk management.
• Leading a multidisciplinary, matrixed engineering organization.