Manager of Engineering - Autonomous Pilot Integration - Expeditionary (R5175)

About the role

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

Job Description:
The Autonomous Pilot Integration team for expeditionary platforms builds autonomy solutions for V-BAT — an unmanned aircraft operating in expeditionary environments for ISR, target acquisition, communications, and multi-agent missions. The team also builds autonomy for X-BAT, a new platform under development by the aircraft team; for X-BAT, the team builds on top of the existing mission autonomy solution from the Strategic Systems (ACP) portfolio and works closely with the aircraft team on the flight-autonomy interface. We combine capabilities from the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team (e.g., ViDAR, ATR), and the HivemindSDK to develop the autonomy software that runs on these platforms, then integrate, validate, and field it on the real hardware — for U.S. and international defense customers. Our engineers write new autonomy code — such as mission behaviors, platform-specific control (including VTOL transitions), multi-agent coordination, contingencies, and executive autonomy — and own it end-to-end from software-in-the-loop, to hardware-in-the-loop, to vehicle-in-the-loop, to live test exercise.
In this role, you'll lead a team of autonomy engineers focused primarily on Hivemind on V-BAT, with growing scope on Hivemind on X-BAT — owning their delivery, their growth, and the technical health of your area. A core part of the job is growing the team: hiring strong engineers, mentoring them through hard technical work, and shaping their career development. You'll stay technically active — writing code where it best serves the team, staying close to the integration work, making sound technical decisions, and leading them through the design, development, and delivery of a major capability or program. A defining part of this role is working in extreme partnership with the aircraft team that builds and maintains V-BAT and X-BAT — the relationship and tight coordination with them is critical to your team's success. You'll also partner closely with the Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, and GCS teams, feature crews, customer/program offices, the operator community that flies V-BAT today, and prospective customers for X-BAT as the new platform matures. This portfolio has a strong fielded-operator culture — long-endurance ISR missions, customer-driven workflow iteration, and demanding live exercises across multiple U.S. and international services — and you'll set the pace for your team accordingly.