3 months ago
Base Salary
$150k - $230k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, optimize, and field high-performance Ground Control Station and Command & Control software.
- Build map-centric mission planning, real-time command and control, video streaming, telemetry visualization, and post-mission debrief capabilities.
- Customize and extend QGroundControl and Qt/C++ frameworks for custom vehicle protocols and multi-agent operations.
- Own technical direction, architecture, design reviews, UI/UX layouts, interface contracts, and technical decisions for major features.
- Collaborate with autonomy, perception, flight operations, external partners, platform integrators, C2 providers, and vehicle vendors.
- Mentor mid-level engineers, support onboarding and growth planning, formally onboard senior hires, and participate in hiring.
- Build, configure, validate, and release mission-ready ground stations while coordinating hardware/software compatibility.
- Travel to test sites and support flight tests, range exercises, on-water trials, integration events, and live mission operations.
- Diagnose UI responsiveness, memory, network latency, radio link, payload control, and telemetry integration issues.
- Develop telemetry analysis, log parsing, playback, visualization, deployment, testing, and mission-reliability tools.
- Own compliance and integration with C2 standards and architectures including A-GRA, UCI, OMS, STANAG 4586, and MAVLink.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- Typically requires 7 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree, 6 years with a master’s degree, 4 years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
- Strong C++ proficiency and experience with complex, multithreaded, or latency-sensitive desktop applications.
- Experience building responsive user interfaces with Qt/QML or similar modern UI frameworks.
- Hands-on experience customizing, extending, or building with QGroundControl or comparable ground station software.
- Experience with full-stack or backend development using C/C++, Python, TypeScript, or Go, including service orchestration, command/status interfaces, and data pipelines.
- Deep familiarity with networked and distributed systems, UDP/TCP transport, custom binary protocols, reliable messaging, pub-sub/IPC middleware, and serialization/IDL tooling.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools for software design, implementation, debugging, testing, and code review.
- Demonstrated ownership of a major software capability or system from architecture through field delivery.
- Track record of mentoring engineers and developing technical talent.
- Experience authoring or negotiating interface contracts, schemas, or ICDs.
- Strong debugging and profiling skills, including memory leak, UI responsiveness, and network latency diagnosis.
- Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.
- Preferred experience includes GIS, map rendering, spatial visualization, video streaming, multimedia, telemetry analysis, containerization, cloud or edge deployment, autopilot protocols, DoD C2 standards, and collaboration with operators, pilots, or military stakeholders.
- Active Secret or Top Secret clearance is preferred.
Benefits
- Full-time regular employee offer package includes bonus, benefits, and equity in addition to base pay.
- Temporary employees receive a temporary benefits package applicable after 60 days of employment.
- The role typically requires 10–20% travel for field integration, customer demonstrations, and test events.
- Offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Shield AI
Founded in 2015, 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.