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Shield AI

a16z portfolio company

Senior Engineer, Research-to-Product Perception (R6022)

Location
San Diego, California, San Mateo, California
Work arrangement
On-site
Job type
Full-time
Compensation
USD 165,000–300,000

About the role

Posted Oct 3, 2026

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:

Bring promising AI research into autonomous systems that operate in the real world.  Shield AI’s Perception team is looking for an engineer who enjoys exploring new ideas and making them work on real hardware. You’ll help turn advances in multimodal computer vision, visual foundation models, and embodied AI into useful capabilities for autonomous aircraft and vehicles. 

Working alongside researchers and autonomy engineers, you’ll evaluate promising approaches, build prototypes, and carry successful ideas into the Hivemind product. You’ll combine learned methods with established perception techniques, working through the sensor, software, and compute challenges that make edge robotics different from a benchmark. 

What you'll do:

  • Evaluate emerging models and methods against representative sensor data and autonomy needs. 
  • Build prototypes and experiments that reveal strengths, limitations, and practical deployment opportunities. 
  • Combine learned and classical approaches to improve detection, tracking, geometric vision, or sensor fusion. 
  • Optimize and integrate capabilities for edge deployment, contributing Python and C++ software with support from experienced product engineers. 
  • Help deliver tested, documented capabilities and stay involved as other teams adopt them. 

Required qualifications:

  • A PhD in computer vision, machine learning (ML/DL), robotics, or a related field, or an equivalent record of advanced research and hands-on engineering. 
  • Research depth in an area such as multimodal vision, visual foundation models, video understanding, open-vocabulary perception, or embodied learning. 
  • Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or a comparable ML framework. 
  • A thoughtful approach to experiments, evaluation data, and understanding why models fail. 
  • Experience building substantial research software, an interest in developing production-quality C++, and a collaborative approach to solving problems. 

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience bringing a research prototype into sustained use. 
  • Experience with robotics, real sensors, temporal data, or multi-sensor perception. 
  • Familiarity with vision-language models, vision-language-action models, or embodied AI. 
  • Experience with C++, edge inference, or model optimization using tools such as ONNX, TensorRT, or CUDA. 
  • You don’t need to meet every preferred qualification or arrive as an expert C++ engineer. We welcome recent PhD graduates and early-career researchers, and we value technical depth, curiosity, and enthusiasm to transfer research to business value more than publication count alone. 
#LI-KC3
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Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
 
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
 
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
 
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know. 

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At a glance

Location
San Diego, California · San Mateo, California
Workplace
On-site
Employment
Full-time
Team
Hivemind Enterprise Division
Compensation
USD 165,000–300,000
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You’ll be taken to Shield AI to apply.

The company

Shield AI

Shield AI

Shield AI's mission is to protect service members and innocent civilians with artificially intelligent systems. Our initial focus is on the last several miles of the battlefield where we lack capability to collect intelligence. This area is beyond the view of high altitude sensors, too dangerous for people, and too complex for robots to navigate. Consequently, service members are asked to make life altering decisions with limited information. Mistakes are made that cost lives and incur massive collateral damage. Such mistakes cause the United States to lose support of local populations and make conflict unwinnable. This problem is widely recognized throughout the DoD, including the most senior leadership. To address this problem, we are building swarms of small intelligent robots to collect the critical missing information. The systems will scour indoor and outdoor spaces in search of threats and innocent people. They will be deployed by people, trucks, ships, aircraft, and other robots. These robots will become more numerous in combat areas than soldiers. Synthesized information will be presented to service members who will be empowered to make decisions leading to intended outcomes without collateral damage. Conflict becomes less brutal.

Series G

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1,000–5,000 employees
AI
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