Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035)
About this role
This role addresses the need to build and maintain robust integration environments and testing infrastructure for Shield AI's autonomy software. The team is focused on ensuring the reliability and readiness of their core autonomy components, such as Hivemind, V-BAT, and X-BAT, which are central to their defense technology mission. This position is crucial for bridging the gap between individual component development and the full, integrated autonomy stack, ensuring that software components work correctly across system boundaries.
The Senior Software Engineer will be responsible for developing and maintaining the shared integration environment, including test fixtures and end-to-end examples. A significant part of the work involves creating automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests to validate behavior across autonomy components. This engineer will also troubleshoot complex failures across system boundaries, isolating issues, and providing clear evidence for necessary infrastructure or component changes. They will develop necessary adaptors and documentation to improve repeatability and overall integration quality.
Candidates who thrive in environments requiring deep systems-debugging skills and the ability to communicate complex technical findings to various engineering disciplines would be well-suited for this role. This position is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys tackling difficult integration challenges within safety-critical, real-time systems.
What you will do
- Build and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples.
- Partner with component teams to enhance the shared integration environment and maintain the integration baseline.
- Develop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise autonomy component behavior.
- Integrate and debug production software across planning, controls, simulation, and vehicle interfaces.
- Investigate failures across system boundaries, reproducing and instrumenting problems to isolate the responsible layer.
- Develop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with necessary documentation.
- Improve repeatability through focused integration tooling for configuration validation, diagnostics, and test orchestration.
- Support the deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to hardware, including configuration and interface troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with the flight-test team to define test objectives and analyze integration failures after test events.
What you need
- A Bachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience is required.
- Demonstrated experience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software is necessary.
- Strong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python are essential.
- Hands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment and debugging, must be present.
- Experience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests is required.
- Experience developing and debugging software on Linux operating systems is necessary.
- Strong systems-debugging skills are required, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries.
- The candidate must be able to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems.
Nice to have
- 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
- Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote policy for this role?
The posting does not specify the remote work policy for this position.
What is the compensation structure?
The compensation includes pay within the listed range, a bonus, benefits, and equity. Salary compensation is influenced by factors such as skill set, level of experience, licenses, and certifications.
What is the primary technology stack used?
The primary programming languages mentioned are modern C++ and Python, with development and debugging experience required on Linux.
What kind of team structure is involved?
The role requires the ability to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines.