Senior Staff Software Engineer – Perception

About the role

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of advanced perception models for autonomous systems. You will work at the intersection of research and production, turning cutting‑edge AI research into reliable, mission‑ready capabilities for defense customers.

Key responsibilities

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

Required profile

• Minimum 10 years of relevant experience with a Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent combinations of education and experience).
• Mastery of machine‑learning fundamentals and strong analytical/problem‑solving skills.
• Experience training and deploying computer‑vision models in production environments.
• Deep understanding of 3D vision algorithms.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET security clearance.

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python.
• Proficiency in C++.
• Experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Expertise deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.