Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration

About the role

Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration, to join its Planning and Controls team and work daily with the Pilot's cross-functional Integration team. The role builds durable integration capability: reliable environments, representative end-to-end tests, diagnosable failures and software ready for hardware and flight testing. Engineers are hired across experience levels, starting with well-defined integrations or independently owning end-to-end workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures and end-to-end examples.
• Partner with component teams to add capabilities, maintain the integration baseline and resolve gaps in workflows, test harnesses or extensibility.
• Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests.
• Integrate and debug production software across planning, controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces and other parts of the autonomy stack.
• Investigate failures across system boundaries, reproduce and instrument problems, isolate the responsible layer and fix integration-owned defects.
• Develop bridge blocks and adaptors for vehicle and hardware interfaces, with tests and documentation.
• Improve repeatability with tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration and failure triage.
• Support deployment of the autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting and lab or field debugging.
• Work with the flight-test team on test objectives, readiness assessment, troubleshooting during tests and analysis of integration failures.
• Write setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks and executable examples, and contribute technical material to Pilot training.
• Surface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems to inform architectural decisions.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, robotics or similar, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience developing or integrating planning, controls or autonomy decision-making software.
• Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry and lab or field debugging.
• Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field or flight-test events outside normal working hours.

Required skills

• Modern C++ and Python.
• Software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests.
• Linux development and debugging.
• Systems debugging across configuration, software, network, timing and hardware boundaries.
• Maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems.

Preferred: experience across autonomy domains (perception, state estimation, planning, controls, simulation, communications, vehicle interfaces), aircraft integration or flight-test readiness, robotics middleware such as MAVLink, configuration-driven systems, and leading ambiguous technical investigations.