Hybrid Senior Principal Architect, Hivemind Product (R3667) en Shield ai
Shield ai · San Diego Metro Area, Estados Unidos De América · Hybrid
- Oficina en San Diego Metro Area
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Boston, Abu Dhabi (UAE), Kyiv (Ukraine), and Melbourne (Australia), Shield AI’s technology actively supports U.S. and allied operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn,X, YouTubeand Instagram.
Job Description:
As an Architect on the Hivemind product engineering team, you will serve as a strategic technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and APIs of Shield AI’s full autonomy ecosystem, spanning developer tooling, autonomy algorithms, mission planning systems, simulation environments, and fielded autonomous platforms. You will work cross-functionally with each engineering team to ensure the Hivemind product family is built on a foundation of cohesive, scalable, and testable software systems that can support rapid iteration, integration, and deployment.
This role emphasizes technical rigor, engineering process excellence, and system-wide thinking. You’ll guide the evolution of key abstractions, interface contracts, and modularization patterns that enable independent team velocity while maintaining the integrity and safety of the broader system. In partnership with engineering and product leaders, you will help codify and refine our development processes, advocate for high-quality system design practices, and support the technical roadmap for both near-term deliverables and long-term autonomy goals.
The key to your success will be your ability to balance system flexibility with reliability, enabling Hivemind teams to deliver complex functionality with confidence. This includes influencing architectural trade-offs, promoting sound engineering practices (design reviews, diagrams, and RFCs), driving the adoption of automated testing strategies (including simulation-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop validation), and ensuring thoughtful integration across embedded software, autonomy algorithms, and user-facing systems.
You’ll be a champion of architectural consistency and software quality across Hivemind, helping teams navigate complexity, manage technical debt, and make informed decisions about system evolution. This role is suited for a systems thinker with a strong software development background, deep respect for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and a passion for advancing the state of autonomy through principled engineering.
