Staff Engineer, Autonomy Software Integration - San Mateo (R4483)

Job Description:

Are you a passionate and innovative engineer looking to help develop state-of-the-art AI and robotics products? Are you eager to make a positive difference in the world? Do you want to work alongside mission-driven and values-focused teammates? Shield AI is just the place for you!

The Hivemind Quality team is committed to ensuring our autonomy platform delivers a seamless developer experience and enables customers to build world-class autonomous systems. We focus on integrating, validating, and continuously improving the Hivemind ecosystem-spanning autonomy behaviors, sensor processing, multi-agent coordination, ground-control systems, and embedded platforms. Our mission is to ensure that autonomy developers can efficiently build, test, and deploy autonomous applications that meet real-world mission objectives.

We are seeking an experienced Software Integration Engineer passionate about autonomy development. In this role, you will become a power user of the Hivemind SDK, deeply understanding its capabilities and identifying gaps from a customer perspective. You will develop and validate customer use cases, evaluate the ease of use for autonomy developers, and provide actionable feedback to Engineering and Product teams. You will play a critical role in integrating new autonomy capabilities into the platform, assessing feature completeness, and anticipating novel customer workflows and edge cases. This position bridges the gap between engineering development and real-world autonomy applications-ensuring our platform empowers customers to build reliable, mission-ready autonomous systems.

What you'll do:

• Become a systems integration expert for autonomous robotics: Develop deep expertise in our AI-powered autonomy stack.
• Learn to configure, deploy, and integrate multi-agent systems across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and flight platforms.
• Understand the full system end-to-end-from sensor inputs to autonomous behaviors.
• Integrate new capabilities into the autonomy stack: Collaborate cross-functionally with development teams to bring autonomy algorithms, perception pipelines, middleware, and platform interfaces into the integrated product. Ensure seamless interoperability between components.
• Enable platform bring-up and validation: Lead the integration of autonomy software onto new robotic hardware platforms.
• Configure sensor drivers, communication interfaces, and platform adapters to enable full autonomy stack functionality on prototype and production vehicles.
• Develop integration tooling & infrastructure: Architect and implement integration frameworks, deployment scripts, and configuration management tools that streamline bringing new capabilities into Software-in-the-Loop (SIL), Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and flight environments.
• Support cross-platform compatibility: Work with other integration engineers to ensure the autonomy stack operates reliably across all supported platforms, operating systems, and deployment configurations. Identify and resolve integration issues across system boundaries.
• Analyze system behavior and root-cause issues: Evaluate system logs, telemetry, and rosbag data to diagnose integration defects. Collaborate with developers to isolate issues to specific subsystems and drive resolution. Create analysis tooling to accelerate debugging.
• Optimize integration workflows and CI/CD: Partner with DevOps teams to streamline integration pipelines, reduce build-to-deploy cycle times, and ensure robust continuous integration of new features. Define integration checkpoints and criteria for release readiness.
• Validate system requirements and interface contracts: Work with engineers to ensure integrated capabilities meet product requirements and interface specifications. Assist in developing tooling to verify end-to-end system compliance and traceability.

Required qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree in CS, Comp Eng, Robotics, or a related field; or 6 years and a master’s degree; or 4 years with a PhD.
• Proficiency in programming languages including Python or C++.
• Experience with autonomous systems or server applications or middleware.
• Demonstrated experience designing integration workflows, communicating system dependencies, and triaging and reporting integration defects across subsystem boundaries.
• Proficiency with simulation tools and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing environments.
• Strong expertise with CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a proven track record of delivering high-quality software solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of collaborating effectively across various teams and presenting to customers or technical leadership.

Preferred qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience building complex systems with a strong understanding of software architecture and design principles.
• Experience with hardware or embedded systems.
• Expert knowledge of Python.
• Experience with ROS.
• Experience with white box testing
• Familiarity with networking, operating-systems, and radio communications.
• Experience designing automated tooling for testing for GUI applications.
• Experience designing automated tooling for testing server applications.