Principal Engineer

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Principal Engineer in USA new

Shield AI
Full time
Email

USA
10/18/2026
Report

San Diego, CA

Responsibilities

Own and evolve architecture across operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces, and edge deployments.
Enable mission applications for single-vehicle, multi-vehicle, heterogeneous fleet, theater-level planning, and battlespace management workflows.
Define APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, versioning, and integration tooling for customers and partners.
Lead interoperability with external mission systems and defense C2/BMS environments.
Develop operator and AI-assisted workflows with clear authority, approval, observability, and evaluation boundaries.
Own fleet inventory, health monitoring, configuration versioning, compatibility, controlled updates, rollback, and traceability.
Design edge applications for intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, distributed state, and partial failures.
Drive technical roadmaps, architectural priorities, milestones, tradeoffs, and execution across teams.
Support customer deployment, acceptance, sustainment, and product improvements informed by field experience and telemetry.

Requirements

15+ years of professional software engineering experience or an equivalent record of technical depth and impact.
5+ years of technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent.
Deep experience developing defense ground control station and C2 applications, including mission planning, execution, operator workflows, and battle-management integration.
Demonstrated experience shipping and sustaining software products for defense customers through deployment, acceptance, and field-informed improvement.
Strong architecture and implementation skills across distributed systems, application services, APIs, data management, and operator-facing software.
Experience building extensible platforms for multiple teams and external customers, including interfaces, reusable capabilities, versioning, and cross-organizational integration.
Experience with autonomous robotics applications, fleet operations, configuration management, telemetry, and ground-to-platform autonomy interactions.
Strong understanding of networked systems and edge deployments, including performance, reliability, security, and limited or interrupted connectivity.
Ability to translate ambiguous customer needs into technical roadmaps, executable plans, and delivered capabilities.
Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred experience includes Lattice or comparable defense C2/BMS platforms, multi-domain operations, heterogeneous autonomous fleets, agentic or AI-assisted applications, geospatial systems, mission rehearsal, telemetry replay, post-mission analysis, and secure defense software delivery.

Benefits

Full-time regular employee package includes pay within the listed range, bonus, benefits, and equity.
Temporary employee package includes pay within the listed range and temporary benefits applicable after 60 days of employment.
Offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
Shield AI provides equal employment opportunity and accommodation support for disabilities or special needs.

Salary: $220k - $330k/yr

Shield AI

Shield AI builds autonomous systems for military and national security customers, combining its Hivemind autonomy software with V-BAT and X-BAT unmanned aircraft and Aechelon simulation technologies. The privately held company sells hardware, software, and related services to U.S. and allied defe...

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