Staff Engineer, Test Automation - San Mateo (R5792)

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 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.

The Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform. You will define and evolve test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines that enable the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments.

You will work across production flight code, machine learning models, simulation and synthetic environments, mission planning and orchestration systems, operator-facing Ground Control Station applications, telemetry and data pipelines, cloud-native developer infrastructure, and hardware-in-the-loop systems.

In this hands-on Staff role, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, establish automation and verification standards, identify systemic quality risks, and develop scalable test infrastructure. The ideal candidate combines deep Python automation and distributed-systems testing experience with technical leadership and experience validating machine learning systems throughout the data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.

What you'll do:

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for automated testing, verification, and MLOps quality across the Hivemind ecosystem.
• Design and maintain scalable test frameworks for autonomy software, backend services, APIs, operator-facing applications, and distributed hardware environments.
• Lead functional, integration, regression, system, performance, reliability, and end-to-end testing across simulation, edge-compute, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
• Build automated ML validation pipelines covering data quality, training reproducibility, model accuracy, robustness, regression, latency, resource utilization, and system integration.
• Establish CI/CD and continuous training workflows that provide versioning and traceability for datasets, models, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment artifacts.
• Develop scenario-based validation for autonomy models, including edge cases, degraded sensing or communications, distribution shifts, and representative mission conditions.
• Create observability, analytics, and failure-triage capabilities for software behavior, model and data drift, inference health, test results, and production performance.
• Build Python automation that improves test execution, parallelization, reporting, environment setup, experiment comparison, and developer productivity.
• Create test harnesses, simulators, stubs, mocks, and synthetic data capabilities that improve system testability and coverage.
• Collaborate with software, autonomy, machine learning, data, simulation, and systems engineers to define verification strategies and improve designs before implementation.
• Develop and govern AI-assisted engineering workflows using coding agents and LLM-based tools for test generation, log analysis, debugging, and failure triage while maintaining security, reproducibility, and traceability.

Required qualifications:

• Typically 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer tooling, MLOps, systems integration, or systems verification, or an equivalent combination of experience and demonstrated impact.
• 5+ years of experience building scalable automation frameworks or developer tooling in Python.
• Demonstrated success designing test, CI/CD, or MLOps infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience validating machine learning systems across the data, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
• Understanding of ML quality risks such as data leakage, training-serving skew, nondeterminism, distribution shift, drift, model regression, and statistical acceptance criteria.
• Experience defining model-performance baselines, automated evaluation suites, release thresholds, and candidate-to-production comparison workflows.
• Experience testing GPU-accelerated infrastructure and workloads, including GPU scheduling, allocation, utilization, and resource contention in Kubernetes environments.
• Experience with performance benchmarking, profiling, and observability for GPU workloads, including identifying compute, memory, storage, networking, and data-loading bottlenecks.
• Experience validating multi-tenant Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, resource quotas, workload isolation, and scheduling behavior.
• Experience qualifying integrated hardware and software systems, including automated validation of compute, GPU, storage, networking, drivers, firmware, and deployed software configurations.
• Strong system-design skills and experience testing distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and integrated hardware and software environments.
• Experience developing integration and regression strategies for internally developed, third-party, open-source, and partner software, including dependency management, compatibility testing, and upgrades.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous and concurrent Python programming for scalable automation and parallel test execution.
• Experience with package and dependency management, reproducible environments, and build systems such as Conan, pip, setuptools, Poetry, Nix, or similar.
• Experience with automated observability, log collection, analytics, reporting, and root-cause analysis in complex software, data, and infrastructure systems.
• Experience working in Linux-based development environments.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with model registries, experiment tracking, dataset or feature versioning, model serving, and automated artifact promotion using MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or similar platforms.
• Experience with GPU scheduling and orchestration platforms such as Run:ai, NVIDIA GPU Operator, KAI Scheduler, Kueue, Volcano, or similar technologies.
• Experience with NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, including CUDA, drivers, container runtimes, Multi-Instance GPU, GPU fractionalization, and hardware/software compatibility testing.
• Experience with GPU profiling and performance-analysis tools such as NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, or similar technologies.
• Experience validating perception, planning, decision-making, reinforcement learning, or other autonomy models in simulation and on deployed systems.
• Experience testing models on embedded or edge-compute platforms, including latency, memory, power, accelerator compatibility, quantization, and hardware-specific behavior.
• Experience qualifying production servers or appliances, including hardware validation, burn-in, provisioning, firmware, networking, storage, and software-stack validation before deployment.
• Experience with reliability, fault-injection, and recovery testing across distributed compute, storage, networking, and GPU infrastructure.
• Experience validating reproducible installation, operation, upgrades, and rollback in cloud, on-premises, disconnected, or air-gapped environments.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, and reproducible test environments.
• Proficiency with Go or TypeScript for automation tooling or UI test development.
• Experience integrating Python with native C or C++ applications through bindings, wrappers, subprocess interfaces, or similar interoperability tooling.
• Aerospace, robotics, autonomy, embedded systems, or safety-critical software experience.
• Familiarity with software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, requirements-based verification, configuration management, artifact traceability, or standards such as DO-178C and MIL-STD-882.

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Full-time regular employee offer package:

Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package:

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.

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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.