Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245)

The role

This Principal Engineer will drive the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of an edge application platform for autonomous systems. The role covers ground control stations, command and control, battle-management integration, fleet management, and agentic operator workflows.

What you will do

• Own the platform architecture across operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces and edge deployment.
• Guide evolution from single-vehicle ground control to multi-vehicle fleet operations and theater-level planning.
• Establish APIs, SDKs, shared data models and extension mechanisms that customers and partners can use.
• Lead integration with external command-and-control and battle-management systems.
• Partner with autonomy, AI, product and design teams on operator and agentic workflows, including approval boundaries and observability.
• Establish asset inventory, health monitoring, configuration versioning, controlled updates and rollback for deployed autonomous systems.
• Design for intermittent connectivity, limited bandwidth and recovery from partial failures.
• Turn product strategy and customer feedback into a technical roadmap, milestones and tradeoffs.
• Work with integration, test, field and customer teams from requirements through deployment and sustainment.

Required qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of technical depth and impact.
• 5+ years providing technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer or equivalent.
• Deep experience developing defense GCS and C2 applications, including mission planning, mission execution and operator workflows.
• A record of shipping and sustaining software products for defense customers.
• Strong software architecture and implementation skills across distributed systems, APIs, data management and operator-facing software.
• Experience building extensible platforms used by multiple teams and external customers.
• Experience with autonomous robotics applications, including fleet operations, configuration management and telemetry.
• Strong understanding of networked systems and edge deployments, including behavior under limited or interrupted connectivity.
• Ability to turn ambiguous stakeholder needs into technical roadmaps and delivered capabilities, with excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Direct experience developing or integrating platforms such as Lattice or other extensible defense C2/BMS products.
• Experience with multi-domain operations and heterogeneous autonomous fleets.
• Experience delivering agentic or AI-assisted applications, including workflow orchestration and operator supervision.
• Experience with geospatial applications, common operational pictures, mission rehearsal or telemetry replay.
• Experience with secure software delivery into defense environments.

Benefits

• Full-time regular employees receive a bonus and equity in addition to benefits.
• Temporary employees receive a temporary benefits package after 60 days of employment.

Before you apply

• All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
• Pay depends on factors including skill set, experience, licenses and certifications, and work location.
• 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.