Staff Engineer, Perception (R5611)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Shield AI’s mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. We are seeking a Senior or Staff Robotics Perception Engineer to develop and deploy advanced perception and navigation capabilities for autonomous aircraft operating in complex and GNSS-denied environments.

This role requires deep expertise in visual-inertial odometry (VIO), visual SLAM, vision-based navigation, state estimation, and camera–IMU sensor fusion. You will take algorithms from early-stage prototypes through embedded implementation, field testing, and flight validation on operational autonomous platforms.

This is not a general AI/ML or object-detection role. We are looking for an engineer whose core expertise lies at the intersection of robotics perception, VIO/SLAM, state estimation, camera and inertial sensing, and real-time embedded deployment.