Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R4985)

The role

This role develops and deploys machine learning models for vision, vision-language and vision-language-action perception on autonomous systems. You will build data pipelines, training workflows and deployment tools, and work with research, autonomy and platform teams for U.S. and international defense customers.

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 machine learning research into production-ready capabilities.
• 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 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 9 years with a Master's degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Mastery of 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 deploying models using 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.
• Equity for full-time regular employees.
• Benefits package for full-time regular employees.
• Temporary benefits package applicable after 60 days of employment for temporary employees.

Before you apply

• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance is required.
• All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
• Pay depends on factors such as skill set, experience, licences, 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.