Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)
San Diego · USD 230,000-350,000 / year · Onsite · Posted Sep 22, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Onsite
- Location
- San Diego
- Salary
- USD 230,000-350,000 / year
About the role
- Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead to build and maintain stable Pilot integrated implementations and reference configurations.
- The role involves partnering with component teams, developing automated tests, and investigating failures across system boundaries.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain stable Pilot integrated implementations, 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.
- Develop and maintain glue layer between mission autonomy software and platform software for easy integration and deployment of the 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.
- 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 Operations 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. Contribute technical material to Pilot training.
- Drive strategy and implementation diverse set of autonomy reference integrations to serve various representative missions.
- Develop workflows and tooling to enable seamless deployment of autonomy software on edge devices.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, or equivalent practical experience.
- Demonstrated experience through professional work, internships, research, or substantial projects building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for perception, planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or a closely related algorithmic domain.
- Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including safe use of common concurrency patterns and the ability to diagnose issues such as data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors.
- Working experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, and maintainable software design.
- Practical experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
- Practical experience working with build / dependency management systems such as Conan or Nix.
Preferred qualifications
- Master’s degree in AI. Computer Science, Robotics or similar.
- Breadth of experience across the autonomy stack (Perception, Localization and Planning).
- Experience with multi-agent autonomy
- Experience applying VLMs or VLAs to planning, reasoning, tool use, or autonomous decision-making.
- Experience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained autonomous systems.
- Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop simulation, performance profiling, or distributed systems.
Benefits
- Bonus
- Benefits
- Equity
- temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Skills
- C++
- Python
- Linux
- Conan
- Nix
