Principal Engineer, Hivemind Foundations (R3002)

Introduction to Shield AIFounded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world’s best AI pilot. Its AI pilot, Hivemind, has flown a fighter jet (F-16), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (V-BAT), and a quadcopter (Nova). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington DC and abroad. Shield AI’s products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies.

As part of the Hivemind Foundations (HMF) team, you will play a critical role in shaping and implementing the EdgeOS product. You will partner with the Director of the HMF team to define and execute on HMF team’s vision.

EdgeOS is a foundational, extensible set of developer facing capabilities that allow development of autonomy systems such as aircraft, marine and land surface vehicles, human-machine interfaces. EdgeOS serves an opinionated, optimized middleware offering capabilities to support all stages of development including simulation stage to real-world operation. You will be the team architect and most impactful developer, collaborating not only within the HMF teams, Hivemind Product managers, Program managers but across all other peer product (e.g., Hivemind Pilot, Forge, Commander) architects, internal and external end-product development teams (e.g., Hivemind-on-X or 3rd party partners), and Customer engineering.

What You'll Do:

• Help define and own HMF team vision and roadmap, in collaboration with engineering, product and customer stakeholders.
• Ensure EdgeOS is the world’s best high performance, extensible, portable, certifiable middleware for autonomy applications.
• Contribute to building, extending and documenting interfaces for internal and customer developer use as a software development kit (SDK)
• Partner with engineers (within and outside direct team), engineering managers, product and program managers to deliver EdgeOS capabilities.
• Coach and mentor team members, including customers’ engineers, on industry and HM best-practices. Partner with managers to support team member career progress.

Required Qualifications:

• 15+ years of related experience developing large, production quality software systems.  Typically, 14 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 12 years experience; or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of hands-on experience and deep experience with C++ (including modern C++17 and beyond).
• Firsthand experience developing deeply embedded, high-performance systems.
• Experience with developer facing solutions like SDKs
• Professional experience developing in Linux environments.
• Solid understanding of network protocols (eg., UDP, TCP, routing, QoS), with experience in designing and implementing networked applications.
• Experience with Git, code management tools & other SDLC tools and practices.  
• Demonstrated record of working hard, being a trustworthy teammate, holding yourself and others to high standards, and being kind to others.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in aerospace and/or robotics industries. 
• Experience with international interoperability standards, especially in defense and autonomy domains like STANAG458, Mavlink.
• Experience or knowledge of integrating embedded solutions with cloud services, and applications.
• Experience with team leadership, or as a technical project lead.