Lead the architecture, development, testing, integration, deployment, and evolution of autonomous behaviors for unmanned platforms across air, land, sea, and space. Develop motion planning, multi-agent coordination, mission planning, and safety capabilities while owning software systems end to end. Collaborate with vehicle integration teams, operational experts, and multidisciplinary stakeholders; provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and support integration events and demonstrations. Travel up to 20% to work with end users and partner teams.
This position on the Autonomy team in India will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviors into our products, acting as technical leads, senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect candidates to demonstrate unparalleled end-to-end outcome ownership, driving the architecting, design, delivery, support, and evolution of safe and effective mission autonomy software throughout the entire product lifecycle.
What you'll do:
- Develop tactical autonomy software to enable unmanned platforms to perform complex missions across air, land, sea, and space domains with minimal human supervision
- Implement and test behaviors that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios
- Work throughout the entire of the software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilizing tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development
- Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and to enable reuse of behaviors across multiple projects and portfolios
- Utilize your software and systems expertise to architect behaviors as scalable software subsystems, that may interact directly or indirectly with a breadth of system components (e.g., sensor processing, state estimation, peer-to-peer communications, contingency management, actuation, and payload interfacing)
- Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms (whether internally and externally owned), with a clear path towards architecture and capability evolution over time
- Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts (e.g., fighter pilots, UAV operators, etc.)
- Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment including engineering, business and sales leadership.
- Travel to co-locate with end-users and/or other teams up to 20% of the time
Required qualifications:
- BS /MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
- Proficient in production-level C++ software development
- 7+ years' experience in one or more of the following: software sub-system scheduling and integration, behavior planning, task and resource allocation, motion planning, optimization, or flight controls
- Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management
- Proven ability to lead multi-disciplinary teams, set technical direction, and manage full project lifecycles from concept to deployment
- Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity
- Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment
- Capacity to act as the technical owner for an entire software system, including stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, roadmap management, team co-ordination, design, implementation, sustainment, and evolution
Preferred qualifications: - Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready
- Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations
- Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to:
- Collaborative mission planning, behavior planning, synchronized teaming
- Automated red force vs blue force tactics
- Motion planning across a variety of vehicle classes, kinematic constraints, and team compositions
- Weapons target assignment, Sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws
- Collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring
- Experience in more than one operational effect (e.g., strike, air combat, surveillance,
Shield AI Melbourne, Victoria, AUS Office
85 Salmon St, Suite 1, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3207
Similar Jobs at Shield AI
Aerospace • Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • Robotics • Software • Defense Technology
Integrate autonomy software onto unmanned aircraft, prepare flight-ready systems, support live flight tests, troubleshoot hardware and software, capture and analyze mission data, and improve deployment processes. Collaborate with autonomy, GNC, systems, and test teams while supporting certification, airworthiness, and compliance activities. Travel to offices, customer sites, and flight integration events approximately 30–40% of the year.
Top Skills:
AfsimAutonomy SoftwareC++DdsEmbedded SystemsFlight Control SystemsGncLinuxNgtsOms StandardsPythonRosRtosSensor FusionSensor IntegrationShell ScriptingUci
Aerospace • Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • Robotics • Software • Defense Technology
Develop and execute automated regression, integration, and system tests for autonomy software. Build simulation-based test frameworks, harnesses, and data validation tools for SIL, HIL, VIL, and mission environments. Diagnose software issues, define testing metrics, support simulation infrastructure, maintain traceable documentation, and integrate test coverage into CI/CD pipelines. Collaborate with software, hardware, and mechanical engineering teams to validate safety, reliability, and performance.
Top Skills:
Ci/CdHardware-In-The-Loop (Hil)PythonSimulation FrameworksSoftware-In-The-Loop (Sil)Vehicle-In-The-Loop (Vil)
Aerospace • Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • Robotics • Software • Defense Technology
Leads an autonomy applications engineering team supporting Shield AI’s Hivemind SDK and customer implementations across air, sea, and space platforms. Responsibilities include technical leadership, customer issue escalation, troubleshooting, onboarding, software architecture and coding, pre- and post-sales support, documentation, process improvement, metrics, hiring development, performance management, and cross-functional collaboration. The role focuses on robotics, edge AI, autonomous systems, and defense aviation applications.
Top Skills:
Autonomy SoftwareC++Edge AiHivemind Autonomy SdkMobile RoboticsPythonRoboticsSoftware Engineering
What you need to know about the Melbourne Tech Scene
Home to 650 biotech companies, 10 major research institutes and nine universities, Melbourne is among one of the top cities for biotech. In fact, some of the greatest medical advancements were conceptualized and developed here, including Symex Lab's "lab-on-a-chip" solution that monitors hormones to predict ovulation for conception, and Denteric's vaccine for periodontal gum disease. Yet, the thousands of people working in the city's healthtech sector are just getting started, to say nothing of the tech advancements across all other sectors.
