Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception (r4985)

Shield AI Shield AI · Defense · Washington, DC +3 · Flight System Integration

Shield AI is a defense-tech company seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for their Perception team. The role involves developing and deploying advanced ML models (vision, VLM, VLA) for autonomous systems, focusing on understanding and interacting with the environment. This includes building data pipelines, SFT workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure, bridging research and production for defense customers.

What you'd actually do

  1. develop and deploy advanced machine learning models that enable autonomous systems to better understand, reason about, and interact with their environment
  2. partner closely with machine learning researchers, autonomy engineers, perception engineers, and platform teams to translate emerging AI capabilities into reliable, production-ready systems for U.S. and international defense customers
  3. build the data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure needed to transform cutting-edge AI research into reliable, mission-ready perception capabilities

Skills

Required

  • machine learning
  • computer vision
  • vision models
  • vision-language models (VLM)
  • vision-language-action models (VLA)
  • data pipelines
  • supervised fine-tuning (SFT)
  • evaluation frameworks
  • deployment infrastructure
  • software engineering

Nice to have

  • autonomous systems
  • AI research
  • defense customers

What the JD emphasized

  • mission-ready perception capabilities
  • production-ready systems
  • operational autonomous platforms

Other signals

  • develop and deploy advanced machine learning models
  • vision, vision-language (VLM), and vision-language-action (VLA) models
  • data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure