Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R5421)

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.

The Hivemind Solutions Perception team develops the next generation of perception capabilities for autonomous systems by combining state-of-the-art machine learning with the proven foundations of computer vision. The team advances how autonomous platforms understand and interpret the world by developing vision, vision-language (VLM), and vision-language-action (VLA) models that tackle core perception challenges such as object understanding, scene interpretation, and mission-relevant environmental awareness. Working at the intersection of research and production, our engineers build the data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure needed to transform cutting-edge AI research into reliable, mission-ready perception capabilities.

In this role, you'll lead the technical development of advanced machine learning solutions that define the future of perception for autonomous systems. You'll own the team's most challenging technical problems, drive architecture and model development across multiple efforts, and influence how foundation models are adapted, evaluated, and deployed for real-world autonomy. Working closely with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams, you'll bridge cutting-edge AI research with scalable production systems while mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across the organization.

Model Development – Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models that improve perception and decision-making for autonomous systems.

Data Pipelines & Model Training – Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission-relevant tasks.

Model Deployment & Optimization – Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.

Perception & Autonomy Applications – Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments.

Research-to-Production – Translate cutting-edge machine learning research into production-ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.

Cross-functional Collaboration – Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission-ready autonomous systems.

Model Evaluation & Validation – Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.

Continuous Improvement – Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.

Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.

Expertise of machine learning fundamentals.

Experience training an deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.

Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.

Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.

Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.

Proficiency in C++ and Python.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate research into practical applications.

Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance

Experience with developing autonomous systems for defense customers.

Experience with training/finetuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and/or world models.

Contributions to open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision.

Track record of publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).

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