Principal Engineer, Edge Applications

Lead Edge Applications And Mission SystemShield 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.
The Lead Edge Applications and Mission System is responsible to drive the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our edge application platform for autonomous systems. This platform connects operators, autonomous platforms, mission data, and external command-and-control systems, supporting applications ranging from single-vehicle ground control to coordinated fleet operations and theater-level mission planning and execution.
You will shape a platform that customers and partners can readily integrate, extend, and adapt to new missions. The scope includes ground control stations (GCS), command and control (C2), integration with battle-management systems (BMS), fleet and configuration management, and agentic workflows that help operators plan, supervise, and manage autonomous robotic systems.
As the technical lead, you will combine deep defense-domain knowledge with strong software engineering judgment and a record of shipping operational products. You will remain directly involved in architecture, critical implementation work, and technical problem-solving while aligning engineering teams, product leaders, customers, and other stakeholders around a clear technical roadmap.

What you'll do
Own the platform architecture. Define and evolve the architecture across operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces, and edge deployment environments. Establish boundaries that allow teams to deliver capabilities independently while maintaining a coherent product.
Enable the full range of mission applications. Guide the evolution from single-vehicle GCS workflows to multi-vehicle supervision, heterogeneous fleet operations, and applications supporting theater-level planning, execution monitoring, and battlespace management.
Make customer extensibility a core capability. Establish APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, and integration tooling that help customers and partners add platforms, data sources, applications, and workflows quickly. Preserve compatibility as the platform evolves.
Lead C2 and BMS interoperability. Guide integration with external mission systems and comparable defense C2 environments. Enable the aggregation and exchange of vehicle state, mission information, sensor-derived data, and operational context.
Advance operator and agentic workflows. Partner with autonomy, AI, product, and design teams to deliver intuitive planning, supervision, execution, and debrief experiences. Define clear operator authority, approval boundaries, observability, and evaluation criteria for AI-assisted workflows.
Own fleet and configuration architecture. Establish capabilities for asset inventory, readiness and health monitoring, software and configuration versioning, compatibility management, controlled updates, rollback, and traceability across deployed autonomous systems.
Engineer for edge applications in contested environment. Design for intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, distributed state, and recovery from partial failures. Ensure useful and predictable behavior in disconnected and degraded environments.
Drive the technical roadmap and execution. Translate product strategy, customer needs, and operational feedback into architectural priorities, milestones, and measurable deliverables. Resolve dependencies and make explicit tradeoffs among near-term delivery, platform investment, reliability, and technical debt.
Lead products through customer deployment. Partner with integration, test, field, and customer teams from initial requirements through acceptance, deployment, and sustainment. Use field experience, telemetry, and customer feedback to improve subsequent releases.
Required

qualifications:
15+ years of professional software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of technical depth and impact, including substantial responsibility for complex production systems.5+ years providing technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent, with demonstrated influence across multiple teams and ownership of significant architectural decisions.
Deep experience developing defense GCS and C2 applications, with working knowledge of mission planning, mission execution, operator workflows, and integration with broader battle-management environments.
A demonstrated record of shipping and sustaining software products for defense customers, including responsibility for operational deployment, customer acceptance, and improvements informed by field use.
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