Senior Software Engineer, Perception (R5420)

The role

This person will design, train, fine-tune and maintain vision, vision-language and vision-language-action models for autonomous systems. They will also build data pipelines and deploy models into production perception capabilities.

What you will do

• Design, train, fine-tune and maintain vision, vision-language and vision-language-action models.
• Build scalable 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 balancing performance, robustness and reliability.
• Partner with perception, autonomy, platform and software engineering teams.
• Develop benchmarks, testing methods and evaluation frameworks to find failure modes.
• Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows and model lifecycle management.

Required qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 4 years and a Master's degree; or 2 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Proficiency in machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems and 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.

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
• Equity

Before you apply

• A SECRET clearance is required; all offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
• Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits.

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.