Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035)
San Diego · USD 160,000-249,998 / year · Onsite · Posted Oct 3, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- San Diego
- Salary
- USD 160,000-249,998 / year
About the role
- Shield AI is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Autonomy Integration to build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, and test fixtures.
- The role involves integrating and debugging production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and the broader autonomy stack.
- Engineers in this position will develop automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests and collaborate closely with flight-test teams.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples.
- Partner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility.
- Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components.
- Integrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack.
- Investigate failures across system boundaries, reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required.
- Develop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them.
- Improve repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage.
- Support deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging.
- Work with the flight-test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward.
- Write and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples, and contribute technical material to Pilot training.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software.
- Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python.
- Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging.
- Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests.
- Experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
- Strong systems-debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries.
- Ability to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems.
- Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines.
- Ability to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight-test events that may occur outside normal working hours.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience integrating across several autonomy domains, such as perception, state estimation, planning, controls, simulation, communications, or vehicle interfaces.
- Experience supporting aircraft integration or flight-test readiness.
- Experience with robotics middleware, vehicle protocols such as MAVLink, or integration adaptors.
- Experience designing repeatable, diagnosable end-to-end test environments for complex autonomous systems.
- Experience with configuration-driven systems, dependency compatibility, observability, or automated test orchestration.
- Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained systems.
- A record of leading ambiguous technical investigations or mentoring engineers through complex integration work.
Benefits
- Bonus
- Benefits
- Equity
Skills
- C++
- Python
- Linux
- MAVLink
- Robotics Middleware
- Hardware-in-the-loop Testing
- Telemetry
- Simulation
