Manager of Engineering - Autonomous Pilot Integration

About the role

Shield AI is looking for a Manager of Engineering for its Autonomous Pilot Integration team, which builds autonomy solutions for small air- or ground-launched platforms operating in multi-agent fleets, often in disconnected or air-gapped environments. The manager leads a team of autonomy engineers, owns delivery and the team's growth, and stays close to the code to make sound technical decisions.

Key responsibilities

• Manage a small-to-mid-sized engineering team (typically 3-8 engineers), covering performance, growth, leveling and delivery, and run 1:1s and performance reviews.
• Drive hiring, interview and close strong candidates, and mentor engineers through hard technical problems.
• Develop and integrate autonomy software on launched effects platforms, including payload computer bring-up, autopilot integration (PX4, ArduPilot), multi-agent coordination and fleet-scale deployment, and lead a small team through a major capability or program.
• Set technical direction, break down work, unblock the team and report progress to leadership and stakeholders.
• Act as primary technical interface with the Autonomy Capabilities and Perception teams, feature crews, autopilot vendors, C2 providers and customer/contractor partners, and author and negotiate ICDs and interface contracts.
• Drive design reviews, ICDs and post-mortems, and own the build, configuration and validation of mission-ready systems and fleet-scale deployments (50-150+ units).
• Travel to test sites and customer exercises to support live missions, and debug integration issues across autonomy stacks, payload computers and embedded systems, including memory, CPU and timing profiling.
• Capture mission and test data, reproduce issues in simulation, and build tools and processes to improve integration timelines, test reliability and team efficiency.
• Own interface contracts with C2 providers and drive compliance with standards such as UCI, OMS, MOSA, WOSA and TAK/CoT.

Required profile

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 7 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree, or 5 years with a master's, or 4 years with a PhD.
• 2+ years of direct people-management experience (1:1s, performance reviews, hiring decisions).
• Demonstrated experience building or growing an engineering team and mentoring engineers.
• Experience leading a small technical team or owning a major capability from design to field delivery.
• Experience authoring or negotiating interface contracts / ICDs.
• Experience with launched effects, loitering munitions, expendable autonomous systems or comparable small unmanned platforms, and with multi-agent, swarm or fleet-scale autonomy.

Required skills

• Strong C++ proficiency, with real-time or latency-sensitive systems.
• Linux-based development, embedded systems, shell scripting and system diagnostics.
• Middleware, pub-sub or IPC frameworks such as DDS and message buses.
• Hands-on support for live exercises, customer demonstrations and operational test events.