Senior Staff Engineer, System Architect (R5843)

The role

You will own and evolve the architecture of Hivemind Forge, an AI development ecosystem for building, training, evaluating and deploying learning-based autonomy solutions. You will set architectural patterns, standards and traceability, and guide cross-team design within the Systems Engineering, Integration, & Test team.

What you will do

• Own and evolve the architecture of the Hivemind Forge AI development ecosystem.
• Define and maintain architecture products in an integrated model-based systems engineering (MBSE) environment.
• Establish architectural patterns, interfaces, APIs, SDK concepts and technical standards.
• Define the data and metadata architecture for the AI development lifecycle, including lineage, provenance and versioning.
• Ensure traceable pedigree across datasets, training configurations, model artifacts, evaluations and deployed capabilities.
• Architect GenAI-enabled and agentic development workflows with human oversight, security and traceability.
• Define architecture for scalable AI/ML workloads across cloud, high-performance compute and on-premises infrastructure.
• Ensure the ecosystem can be deployed in classified, air-gapped and disconnected environments.
• Review and approve detailed software and data designs and resolve cross-team architectural issues.
• Partner with software, AI/ML, data, systems, product and technical leadership teams.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software or software-intensive systems development, design, and/or architecture.
• Demonstrated experience architecting complex software platforms, developer ecosystems, SDKs, APIs, AI/ML platforms or distributed systems.
• Experience developing AI/ML solutions using synthetic and real-world data.
• Experience in data modeling and data architecture, including metadata, lineage, provenance, versioning and lifecycle management.
• Understanding of end-to-end traceability, reproducibility and auditability across data, models, evaluations, software and deployments.
• Experience applying Generative AI, AI assistants or agents to software, AI/ML or engineering development workflows.
• Practical understanding of Kubernetes, Slurm or comparable workload schedulers, containerization, infrastructure as code and S3-compatible object storage.
• Strong technical leadership and communication skills across multiple engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Experience designing AI-native or agentic workflows, including tool use, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Experience with MLOps, distributed training, simulation, synthetic data generation, experiment tracking or model registries.
• Direct experience developing, training, tuning, evaluating or deploying VLMs, VLAs, world models or foundation models.
• Experience designing or operating software and AI/ML platforms in classified, air-gapped or restricted-network environments.
• Experience with hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, on-premises or edge deployment architectures.
• Experience architecting autonomy, robotics, aerospace, unmanned systems or Physical AI applications.
• Experience applying MBSE methods and tools, including SysML and Cameo/MagicDraw.
• Experience delivering defense, aerospace, safety-relevant or high-assurance systems with rigorous configuration management and verification.

Benefits

• Bonus for full-time regular employees.
• Equity for full-time regular employees.
• Benefits package for full-time regular employees.
• Temporary benefits package for temporary employees, applicable after 60 days of employment.

Before you apply

• All offers are contingent on a cleared background and a possible reference check.
• Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits.
• Salary is influenced by skill set, experience, licences and certifications, and work location.

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.