Engineering Manager – Autonomy and Executive Reasoning (R2424)

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.

The Hivemind Pilot Autonomy team is an agile group of engineers focused on developing state-of-the-art algorithms that drive intelligent and confidence-inspiring path planning while accounting for an uncertain and dynamic world. The team also builds an extensible framework for easily adding and adjusting custom reasoning and task assignment algorithms for specific platforms and missions.

As a Software Engineering Manager on the Hivemind Pilot, you will lead a team at the intersection of executive reasoning and task assignment. You will work closely with talented engineers to architect core systems, set standards for software engineering, drive strategic technical improvements, and mentor other engineers.

What you'll do:

• Serve as the Engineering Manager for a team of autonomy and software engineers (e.g. career & technical mentorship, performance reviews, 1:1’s, etc.).
• Work on systems related to task assignment, executive reasoning, multi-agent collaboration, operations research and integer optimization
• Architect core systems that must be portable and scalable across different UAS platforms and compute architectures (including soft and hard real-time operating systems)
• Work in collaboration with our DevOps teams to architect and maintain our cloud infrastructure, working with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes; assist with cross-platform builds and test orchestration, working with build tools (e.g. CMake, Bazel, etc.) and compiler tool chains (e.g. gcc, llvm, etc.)
• Lead and mentor the team through technical execution of work, roadmapping, sprint/agile processes, software best practices, experimental analyses, removing blockers, etc.
• Grow the team by identifying skill and capacity shortages, then generating and executing to hiring plans
• Collaborate with our engineers, program, and product managers to define a technical roadmap for future autonomy solutions

Required qualifications:

• M.S in operations research, electrical engineering, computer science, aerospace or related engineering field
• 9+ years of experience in engineering autonomous systems or equivalent engineering roles
• 3+ years of people leadership experience leading teams of 4+ people
• Proficient in managing software development lifecycle (SDLC)
• Track record of shipping commercial products in the robotics/autonomy industry
• Proficient with C++ 11 or newer in a production environment
• Experience in a collaborative development environment, focused on continuous integration/delivery & test-driven development
• Strong knowledge of modern software engineering best practices
• Demonstrated record of working hard, strong communication skills, being a trustworthy teammate, and being kind to others
• Strong organizational skills

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in the autonomous vehicle industry
• Ph.D. in operations research, electrical engineering, computer science, or related engineering field
• Knowledge of Python
• Experience leading a team that shipped commercial grade products
• Experience in productizing prototypes into commercial products