Principal Engineer, Ground System Software (R5199) - Shield AI
View Company Profile- Job Title
- Principal Engineer, Ground System Software (R5199)
- Job Location
- Washington, DC
- Job Description
- Founded in 2015, 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 and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. 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:
We are seeking an experienced Software Systems Engineer with a strong background in software design and development and a working knowledge of systems engineering processes, methodologies, and tools. This individual will play a key role in defining, developing, integrating, and validating complex software systems while ensuring alignment with system-level requirements, architecture, and program objectives.
The ideal candidate combines deep technical software expertise with an understanding of systems engineering principles, including requirements management, model-based systems engineering (MBSE), verification and validation, configuration management, customer communications and cross-functional technical leadership.
What you'll do:Required qualifications:Software Architecture & Development
- Participate in the development of software architectures for complex, distributed, and mission-critical systems.
- Engage in software design activities from concept through deployment and sustainment.
- Work with software responsible engineers to develop and model high-quality, scalable, maintainable software solutions using modern programming languages, frameworks & System Modeling Tools.
- Develop, review and maintain architecture diagrams to support government reference architectures.
- Engage with internal stakeholders to develop software architecture behavior diagrams/ documents to support customer deliverables.
- Communicate technical concepts effectively to engineering, program management, and customer stakeholders.
Systems Engineering Integration
- Collaborate with systems engineers to derive software requirements from system-level requirements and operational needs.
- Ensure software solutions maintain traceability to stakeholder, system, and subsystem requirements.
- Participate in architecture trade studies and technical decision-making activities.
- Support system decomposition, interface definition, and allocation of requirements.
- Contribute to system design reviews including SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, and related technical milestones.
- Work closely with hardware, network, test, and integration teams to ensure end-to-end system performance.
Preferred qualifications:- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related technical field.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience.
- 3+ years of software architecture or technical leadership experience.
- Proficiency in a strongly typed programming language (e.g. C#, TypeScript, Java, C++) with exposure to lower-level systems or protocol integration.
- Familiarity with software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies.
- Understanding of systems engineering processes and standards.
- Experience with requirements management and traceability practices.
- Experience using version control and CI/CD tools.
Desired skills:- Experience in aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, aviation, automotive, telecommunications, or other complex systems domains.
- Experience with GCS software, mission planning tools, or real-time visualization platforms.
- Familiarity with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methodologies.
- Experience with systems engineering tools such as:
- Cameo Systems Modeler / MagicDraw
- IBM DOORS Next
- Jama Connect
- Stell
- JIRA
- Confluence
- Experience with cloud-native architectures, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
- Familiarity with Autonomy Government Reference Architectures, Open Mission Systems and Universal Command & Control Interface.
- Ability to operate effectively across multiple engineering disciplines.
- Strong systems thinking and problem-solving abilities.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to translate complex system requirements into practical software solutions.
- Experience balancing technical, programmatic, and operational constraints.
- Strong leadership and collaboration skills.
- Interface Control Documents (ICDs) development and management
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Shield AI Company Size
Between 500 - 1,000 employees
Shield AI Founded Year
2015
Shield AI Total Amount Raised
$1,313,144,960
Shield AI Funding Rounds
View funding detailsSeries F
$240,000,000 USD
Debt Financing
$200,000,000 USD
Series F
$300,000,000 USD
Series E
$60,000,000 USD
Series E
$90,000,000 USD
Debt Financing
$75,000,000 USD
Series D
$210,000,000 USD
Series C
$70,000,000 USD
Debt Financing
$20,000,000 USD
Series B
$25,000,000 USD
Series A
$10,000,000 USD
Series A
$10,500,000 USD
Seed
$2,049,999 USD
Angel
$595,000 USD