Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R5421)

The role

You will lead the technical work on perception models for autonomous systems. This includes vision, vision-language and vision-language-action models, and the pipelines and deployment needed to put them into production. You will also mentor engineers and work with research, autonomy and platform teams.

What you will do

• Design, train, fine-tune and maintain vision, vision-language and vision-language-action models.
• Build data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning workflows and evaluation loops.
• Deploy and optimize models for embedded hardware using ONNX, TensorRT and hardware-accelerated inference.
• Apply machine learning to perception and autonomy problems for aerial and other autonomous systems.
• Translate research into production-ready capabilities.
• Work with perception, autonomy, platform and software engineering teams.
• Develop benchmarks, testing methods and evaluation frameworks.
• Improve training infrastructure, tooling, deployment workflows and model lifecycle management.
• Lead the team's most challenging technical problems and influence architecture and model development.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the organization.

Required qualifications

• Minimum 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 6 years with a Master's degree; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Expertise in machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in production.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems and algorithms.
• Experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Demonstrated expertise deploying models with TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
• Experience training or fine-tuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models and/or world models.
• Contributions to open-source machine learning or computer vision projects.
• Publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).

Benefits

• Bonus.
• Benefits (full-time regular employees; not part-time employees or military fellows).
• Equity (full-time regular employees).
• Temporary benefits package (temporary employees, applicable after 60 days of employment).

Before you apply

• Offers are contingent on a cleared background check and possible reference check.
• A SECRET clearance must be obtainable.

About the company

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company that builds intelligent systems to protect service members and civilians. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation technologies.