Staff Engineer
US$230,000 – US$350,000 / yr base salary
Posted 3 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Level
- R6159
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$230,000 – US$350,000 / yr |
|---|
Field of studyArtificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Robotics (or related)
Study levelBachelor's or higher
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
The Hivemind Pilot group in Hivemind Enterprise org builds algorithms and production platform-agnostic AI/autonomy software that enable teams of edge systems to perceive, reason and act toward achieving mission objectives in complex and dynamic mission environments. Our work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and real-time autonomous systems.
As an Autonomy Integration Lead, you will be responsible for bringing together various autonomy components into integrated reference implementations that enable targeted concept of operations, and taking these through software-in-loop and hardware-in-loop verification. You will draw on your breadth in autonomy to ensure harmonious execution of all autonomy components for effective mission enablement.
What you'll do:
- 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.