Autonomy Engineer Behavior and Motion Planning
Shield AI is a U.S. defense-technology company developing AI-powered autonomy software and autonomous aircraft for military and allied operations.
Funding history
Investors
About Shield AI
Shield AI builds Hivemind, an end-to-end AI-pilot and mission-autonomy software platform for resilient operations in GPS- and communications-denied environments, alongside aircraft and simulation products including V-BAT, X-BAT, and Aechelon.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will research, design, and implement trajectory-planning and control algorithms for autonomous systems. You will build modern C++ software, use Python for prototyping and testing, validate planning performance in simulation and hardware, diagnose failures, shape scalable architecture, and take features through flight testing and maturation.
Requirements
- Experience building, testing, and debugging nontrivial C++ software for optimization, motion planning, robotics, autonomous systems, or a related algorithmic domain.
- Experience writing and debugging modern C++, including concurrency patterns, data races, deadlocks, and lifetime errors.
- Experience with Python for prototyping, analysis, automation, or testing.
- Knowledge of algorithms, data structures, testing, debugging, version control, CI/CD, and maintainable software design.
- Experience developing and debugging software on Linux.
- Ability to communicate technical decisions and collaborate across disciplines.
- For senior-level candidates, a master's degree and 5+ years of relevant professional experience, or a PhD and 4+ years of relevant experience.
- Experience with behavior planning, motion planning, multi-agent systems, trajectory optimization, optimization, Gurobi, OR-Tools, CPLEX, VLMs, VLAs, safety-critical systems, simulation, performance profiling, or distributed systems is preferred.
Responsibilities
- Research, design, and implement autonomous trajectory-planning and control algorithms for single- and multi-agent systems.
- Build reliable and maintainable software in modern C++ and Python.
- Develop tests and evaluate planning-stack performance in simulation and on real hardware.
- Diagnose algorithmic and software failures involving concurrency, performance, and integration.
- Refine requirements and deliver capabilities that meet operational needs.
- Contribute to scalable autonomy and software architecture.
- Take product features from ideation through verification, flight testing, and maturation.
- Mentor junior engineers.
- Apply robotics advancements to challenging problems.
Benefits
- Bonus
- Benefits
- Equity
- Temporary benefits package after 60 days of employment