Staff Software Engineer, Perception

About the role

This position focuses on advancing perception for the Hivemind autonomy software used in V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. You will bridge the gap between AI research and field-ready deployment by creating vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for autonomous defense systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design, train, and maintain vision and vision-language models to improve environmental reasoning for autonomous platforms.
• Create scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning workflows, and evaluation loops to enhance model performance.
• Optimize and deploy models onto embedded hardware utilizing TensorRT and ONNX.
• Apply machine learning to solve perception challenges for aerial systems in complex environments.
• Convert research findings into reliable, production-ready software.
• Collaborate with autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate features into mission-ready systems.
• Establish benchmarks and testing frameworks to assess model accuracy and identify failure points.
• Refine training infrastructure and developer tooling to speed up the production cycle.

Requirements

• Minimum 7 years of experience with a Bachelor degree, 6 years with a Master degree, or 4 years with a PhD, or equivalent professional experience.
• Deep knowledge of machine learning fundamentals.
• Proven experience training and deploying computer vision models in production environments.
• Understanding of 3D vision algorithms and problems.
• Proficiency in PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Expertise in deploying models via TensorRT and ONNX.
• Coding proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience developing autonomous systems specifically for defense applications.
• Background in fine-tuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, or world models.
• Contributions to open-source machine learning or computer vision projects.
• Publication history in venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, RAL, or ICRA.

Skills & tools

• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• C++
• Python
• ONNX
• TensorRT
• Computer Vision
• 3D Vision
• Vision-Language Models (VLM)
• Vision-Language-Action Models (VLA)

Practical notes

Compensation includes base salary, bonus, equity, and benefits. Salary is determined by factors including experience, certifications, and location. All offers require a cleared background check. Shield AI is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.