Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941)

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 builds autonomy systems for defense applications, including air, maritime, and space platforms operating in complex and contested environments.
• We are building the AI Factory Reference Architecture, a Kubernetes-native platform for developing, training, evaluating, and deploying next-generation AI systems.
• The AI Factory serves two purposes.
• Internally, it powers autonomy development across Hivemind and other AI programs.
• Externally, it becomes the reference architecture deployed into customer environments, spanning commercial cloud, on-premise infrastructure, sovereign deployments, and fully air-gapped systems.
• We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to help define and build this platform.
• You will partner closely with ML researchers, platform engineers, and autonomy teams to deliver an exceptional developer experience for training and deploying modern AI models.
• Success in this role requires balancing researcher productivity, platform simplicity, operational excellence, and long-term maintainability.
• You will work hands-on across the stack, helping shape both the platform architecture and its implementation while staying closely aligned with the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem