Senior Principal Engineer, GNC & State Estimation

About the role

Shield AI is hiring a Senior Principal Engineer to establish and lead the technical direction of Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) and State Estimation within Hivemind Enterprise (HME). The role builds the team and capabilities that let customers develop, integrate, validate and deploy reliable autonomy across aircraft platforms, combining senior individual-contributor leadership with the chance to set up a new engineering team.

Key responsibilities

• Define the technical vision, roadmap, architecture and priorities for HME's GNC and State Estimation, aligned with product management, customer needs and partner roadmaps.
• Build the team from the ground up: define capabilities and roles, recruit and assess engineers, set onboarding, mentorship and engineering standards.
• Design, implement, tune and validate guidance, navigation, flight-control and state-estimation algorithms, and contribute to production code and engineering tools.
• Deliver production autopilot and flight-control software from requirements through embedded implementation, integration, verification, deployment and sustainment.
• Build a reusable GNC platform with modular algorithms, interfaces, vehicle and sensor abstractions and validation tools.
• Accelerate the simulation-to-flight cycle with high-fidelity models, automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing, Monte Carlo analysis and regression coverage.
• Contribute to the Runtime Assurance solution and help customers prepare technical evidence for airworthiness.

Required profile

• At least 15 years of GNC experience, including hands-on development of aircraft flight controls, autopilots, navigation and state estimation.
• Demonstrated record of shipping production autopilot, flight-control or integrated GNC software, including flight testing and deployment.
• Previous technical lead, Principal Engineer or chief engineer role with ownership of complex decisions across teams.
• Experience recruiting, mentoring and building a new engineering capability.
• Master's degree in Aerospace, Electrical, Mechanical, Robotics, Applied Mathematics or Computer Science engineering.

Required skills

• C++ for production, real-time software; MATLAB/Simulink or equivalent; Python or comparable tools.
• State estimation and sensor fusion, including inertial navigation and Kalman or nonlinear filtering.
• Safety-critical development: requirements traceability, technical reviews, configuration management, evidence for qualification.
• Reusable algorithms, libraries, interfaces and tools for multiple platforms.
• Version control, code review, continuous integration and automated testing.