Senior Engineer, Human Machine Teaming - Development

About the role

Shield AI, a defense-tech company, is hiring an Engineer II or Senior Engineer in its Human Machine Teaming (HMT) group within Strategic Product Development. The role builds the developer experience and development capabilities by working with SDK and HMI development teams and product managers, and by acting as a conduit between developers, HMT capabilities and customers. It sits alongside the HMT Design, Experimentation and Operations Leads.

Key responsibilities

• Become a skilled user of the Hivemind SDK and its autonomy modules, building with the same tools as development teams and customers.
• Elicit how developers build, evaluate and deploy autonomy using SDK tools such as Forge and Commander, and characterize the requirements their tooling must meet.
• Translate developer, operator and customer needs into design and development requirements, and specify HMT requirements for developer-facing and operator-facing interfaces.
• Review proposed designs against requirements, assess delivered tools, code and systems against stated requirements, and document gaps with remedies.
• Define acceptance criteria and evaluation methods, and maintain traceability from need through requirement, acceptance and robustness testing.
• Develop and maintain HMT design guidance, documentation and training materials.
• Represent HMT in design reviews, architecture decisions and trade-off discussions, and turn recurring friction points into prioritized requirements.
• Work alongside the development team, implementing requirements in code and resolving integration and API issues.
• Support field events and operator engagements, and travel to company, test, demonstration and customer locations (about 40% of time).

Required profile

• Engineer II: typically 2 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 0 years with a Master's or PhD; Senior Engineer: typically 3-5 years with a Bachelor's, or 2-4 years with a Master's, or 2 years with a PhD.
• Degree in computer science, software engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, with a minor in human factors engineering, cognitive systems engineering or human-computer interaction.
• Demonstrated experience eliciting user needs, turning them into requirements and assessing whether delivered systems met them.
• Working knowledge of human machine teaming and human factors concepts, and experience in multidisciplinary settings.
• U.S. citizenship and U.S. DoD Secret clearance, with ability to obtain and maintain Top Secret, SCI and/or SAP-level access.

Required skills

• Hands-on software development experience, able to read code and interfaces.
• Proficiency in Python and C++, and familiarity with at least one other language or tool such as JavaScript, C#, HTML, CSS or Docker.
• Preferred: autonomy, robotics or simulation software, developer-experience research, developer platforms (Git, GitLab, CI/CD), traceability methods or AI assurance frameworks.