Senior Staff Engineer, Weapons Integration - Ranger (R6323)

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. 

Job Description:

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer, Weapons Integration to own the technical architecture, development, and integration of weapons mission critical subsystems for an advanced autonomous aircraft. This engineer will serve as a technical authority across mission computing, avionics, payloads, communications, and associated support systems, translating operational needs into robust, integrated, and verifiable system designs.

In this role, the engineer will define mission system architectures, lead requirements development and allocation, establish performance budgets and interface definitions, and drive complex technical trade studies across hardware, software, and aircraft systems. They will guide technical execution from concept through integration, verification, flight test, and fielding, ensuring that subsystem capabilities collectively satisfy mission performance, safety, airworthiness, and applicable compliance requirements.

What you'll do:

• Own architecture, requirements development and allocation, and integration strategy across data storage, weapons, payloads, avionics, and supporting aircraft systems. Establish performance budgets, interface definitions, and verification criteria that align subsystem designs with vehicle level objectives.
• Serve as a technical authority for weapons integration, leading complex trade studies and system of systems analyses to balance performance, latency, bandwidth, storage capacity, reliability, power, cost, and schedule. Resolve architectural conflicts and guide consequential hardware and software decisions.
• Define and guide integration and verification campaigns from laboratory and hardware in the loop testing through flight test and fielding. Partner with safety, airworthiness, and certification teams to establish compliance approaches addressing applicable MIL Standards and objectives, and drive resolution of critical anomalies and performance gaps.
• Lead multidisciplinary technical reviews and readiness assessments, aligning engineering teams, program leadership, customers, and partners on architecture decisions, technical maturity, integration risks, and mitigation plans. Mentor engineers and establish consistent practices for requirements quality, interface management, configuration control, and verification.

Required qualifications:

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