{"id":1753778,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shield-ai-senior-software-engineer-autonomy-integration-r6035","title":"Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035)","company":{"id":50,"name":"Shield AI","domain":"shield.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/shield-ai","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":54,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.815,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Diego, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":249998,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":249998},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"MAVLink","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-03T04:06:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-03","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T18:18:30Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":10,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":10},"description":"Job Description:\nWe are hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration, who will be embedded in the Planning and Controls team and work day to day with Pilot's cross-functional Integration team. In this hands-on software role, you will build durable integration capability: reliable environments, representative end-to-end tests, diagnosable failures, and software that is ready for hardware and flight testing. You will draw on your experience in planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making and your systems integration skills to work across domain boundaries.\nThe Pilot Integration team provides stable reference integrations that component teams can use to add new capabilities and prove that they work as part of the larger autonomy stack. It builds and maintains the environments where Hivemind Pilot's autonomy capabilities come together. The team's work spans planning and controls, perception, simulation, vehicle interfaces, deployment, and system-level testing.\nWe are hiring across multiple experience levels. Depending on experience, engineers may begin with well-defined integrations and tests or independently own end-to-end workflows and ambiguous cross-system investigations.\nWhat you'll do:\nBuild and maintain stable Pilot integration environments, reference configurations, reusable test fixtures, and representative end-to-end examples. \nPartner with component teams as they add capabilities to the shared integration environment, maintain the integration baseline, and help resolve gaps in shared workflows, test harnesses, or extensibility. \nDevelop and maintain automated software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests that exercise behavior across autonomy components. \nIntegrate and debug production software across planning and controls, simulation, vehicle interfaces, and other parts of the autonomy stack. \nInvestigate failures across system boundaries. Reproduce and instrument each problem, isolate the responsible layer, fix integration-owned defects, and give the owning team clear evidence when a component or infrastructure change is required. \nDevelop integration-oriented bridge blocks and adaptors for common vehicle and hardware interfaces, along with the tests and documentation needed to maintain them. \nImprove repeatability with focused integration tooling for configuration validation, deployment, diagnostics, log collection, test orchestration, and failure triage. \nSupport deployment of the integrated autonomy stack to representative hardware, including software configuration, telemetry, interface troubleshooting, and lab or field debugging. \nWork with the flight-test team to define test objectives, prepare integrated software and instrumentation, assess test readiness, support troubleshooting during test events, and analyze integration failures afterward. \nWrite and maintain setup guides, reference configurations, troubleshooting runbooks, and executable examples. Contribute technical material to Pilot training. \nSurface brittle interfaces and recurring integration problems so that the responsible Pilot teams can make informed architectural decisions. \nImprove integration quality by reducing integration defects and increasing end-to-end test readiness. \nRequired qualifications:\nBachelor's degree in a field such as computer science or robotics, or equivalent practical experience. \nExperience developing or integrating planning, controls, or autonomy decision-making software. \nStrong production software engineering skills in modern C++ and Python. \nHands-on experience integrating software with robotic or autonomous hardware, including deployment, interfaces, telemetry, and lab or field debugging. \nExperience with software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop testing and automated system-level tests. \nExperience developing and debugging software on Linux. \nStrong systems-debugging skills, including the ability to reason across configuration, software, network, timing, and hardware boundaries. \nAbility to write maintainable tests and tools for distributed or real-time systems. \nAbility to communicate technical findings clearly and work effectively with engineers from several disciplines. \nAbility to travel periodically and support lab, field, or flight-test events that may occur outside normal working hours. \nPreferred qualifications:\nExperience integrating across several autonomy domains, such as perception, state estimation, planning, controls, simulation, communications, or vehicle interfaces. \nExperience supporting aircraft integration or flight-test readiness. \nExperience with robotics middleware, vehicle protocols such as MAVLink, or integration adaptors. \nExperience designing repeatable, diagnosable end-to-end test environments for complex autonomous systems. \nExperience with configuration-driven systems, dependency compatibility, observability, or automated test orchestration. \nExperience delivering software for fielded, real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained systems. \nA record of leading ambiguous technical investigations or mentoring engineers through complex integration work.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5103,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Military Drones","Defense Manufacturing","Defense AI","Drone AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-03T09:53:44Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 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