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.

Shield AI’s Hivemind Platform organization is seeking a Principal Systems Engineer to lead and scale systems engineering excellence across our software-intensive, autonomy-driven platform. This role sits within the Systems Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) organization and is responsible for advancing systems engineering discipline, rigor, and cross-functional alignment across the full lifecycle, from requirements definition through architecture, verification, and assurance.

This individual will play a critical role in shaping how complex autonomous system development capabilities are specified, architected, and validated, with a strong emphasis on model-based systems engineering (MBSE), requirements traceability, and integration of system assurance (including safety) into system design.

Systems Engineering Discipline Leadership: Drive the adoption and enforcement of systems engineering best practices across the organization, serving as a technical authority and trusted partner to engineering leadership.

Requirements Management & Traceability: Lead the development of structured, testable, and fully traceable system requirements, ensuring end-to-end linkage across architecture, verification, and implementation.

Architecture Definition: Define and maintain system architectures using MBSE methodologies and tools (e.g., Cameo), promoting model-centric engineering for system understanding and decision-making.

Verification & Validation Planning: Establish comprehensive, executable verification strategies aligned with system requirements and operational use cases, supporting integration and test efforts.

System Assurance Integration: Integrate system safety and security assurance considerations into requirements, architecture, and verification to support mission assurance and compliance objectives.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with software architects, product teams, test engineers, and engineering leadership to align system-level decisions/execution across the organization and bridge between SEIT and the broader engineering organization.

End-to-End Requirements Traceability Established: System requirements are consistently structured, testable, and fully traceable across architecture, implementation, and verification artifacts.

MBSE Adoption at Scale: Model-based systems engineering is broadly adopted, with system architecture and interfaces defined and maintained in a shared, authoritative model.

System Assurance Integrated Early: System safety and assurance considerations are embedded in requirements and architecture upfront, reducing late-stage risk and rework.

Cross-Functional System Alignment Achieved: Software, product, and Integration & Test teams operate with a clear, shared understanding of system architecture, interfaces, and constraints.

Systems Engineering Rigor and Process Maturity Improved: Standardized processes, tools, and artifacts are in place and consistently used across teams, improving quality, predictability, and scalability.

15+ years in Systems Engineering, Architecture, or technical leadership roles

Experience in defense or aerospace, ideally with software-intensive unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)

Strong background in traceable requirements development, system architecture and interface definition, and V&V planning

Hands-on experience with MBSE tools (Cameo Systems Modeler or equivalent) and SysML

Proven ability to lead engineering discipline across teams and influence technical direction

Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field