Staff Software Engineer – Perception

About the role

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of next‑generation perception capabilities for autonomous systems. You will bridge cutting‑edge AI research with production‑ready pipelines, ensuring that vision and vision‑language models operate reliably in mission‑critical environments.

Key responsibilities

• Design, train, fine‑tune and maintain state‑of‑the‑art vision, vision‑language and vision‑language‑action models.
• Build scalable data pipelines and supervised fine‑tuning workflows that continuously improve model performance.
• Deploy and optimize models for embedded hardware using ONNX, TensorRT and other acceleration frameworks.
• Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies and evaluation frameworks to validate model robustness.
• Collaborate with perception, autonomy, platform and software engineering teams to integrate ML capabilities into mission‑ready systems.

Required profile

• Minimum 7 years of relevant experience (or equivalent with advanced degree).
• Deep expertise in machine‑learning fundamentals and computer‑vision pipelines.
• Proven experience training and deploying vision models in production.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems and algorithms.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET security clearance.

Required skills

• Machine Learning
• Computer Vision
• 3D Vision
• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• ONNX
• TensorRT
• C++
• Python