Senior Principal Architect, Hivemind Product (R3667)
San Diego Metro Area
Hivemind Product Division – Engineering /
Full Time Employee /
On-site
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Boston, Abu Dhabi (UAE), Kyiv (Ukraine), and Melbourne (Australia), Shield AI’s technology actively supports U.S. and allied operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn,X, YouTubeand Instagram.
Job Description:
As an Architect on the Hivemind product engineering team, you will serve as a strategic technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and APIs of Shield AI’s full autonomy ecosystem, spanning developer tooling, autonomy algorithms, mission planning systems, simulation environments, and fielded autonomous platforms. You will work cross-functionally with each engineering team to ensure the Hivemind product family is built on a foundation of cohesive, scalable, and testable software systems that can support rapid iteration, integration, and deployment.
This role emphasizes technical rigor, engineering process excellence, and system-wide thinking. You’ll guide the evolution of key abstractions, interface contracts, and modularization patterns that enable independent team velocity while maintaining the integrity and safety of the broader system. In partnership with engineering and product leaders, you will help codify and refine our development processes, advocate for high-quality system design practices, and support the technical roadmap for both near-term deliverables and long-term autonomy goals.
The key to your success will be your ability to balance system flexibility with reliability, enabling Hivemind teams to deliver complex functionality with confidence. This includes influencing architectural trade-offs, promoting sound engineering practices (design reviews, diagrams, and RFCs), driving the adoption of automated testing strategies (including simulation-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop validation), and ensuring thoughtful integration across embedded software, autonomy algorithms, and user-facing systems.
You’ll be a champion of architectural consistency and software quality across Hivemind, helping teams navigate complexity, manage technical debt, and make informed decisions about system evolution. This role is suited for a systems thinker with a strong software development background, deep respect for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and a passion for advancing the state of autonomy through principled engineering.
Key responsibilities:
- Drive architectural strategy and design across the Hivemind product portfolio
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define system interfaces and integration patterns
- Design and enforce software patterns, modularization strategies, and APIs to ensure reliability and maintainability across platforms
- Evaluate and prototype new technologies to improve system performance and resilience
- Mentor engineering teams, review critical code and design documents, and guide implementation consistency
- Support rigorous testing and validation processes to meet deployment and safety-critical standards
- Contribute to long-term platform roadmaps with an emphasis on modular architecture, autonomy reuse, and mission flexibility
Key outcomes:
- Robust Interface Design: clear, versioned API and data contracts that enable independent development and reduce integration risk
- Architecture Review Process: a lightweight, consistent design review mechanism that improves decision quality and technical alignment
- Improved Developer Velocity: streamlined codebases and architectural clarity leading to faster iteration and easier onboarding
- Simulation-Ready Components: components designed for deterministic testing and simulation, enabling high-confidence validation and automation
- Reduced Technical Debt: bottlenecks identified and refactored, increasing system reliability and maintainability
- Cross-Team Alignment: engineering teams aligned around a shared architectural vision, improving collaboration and delivery consistency
- Strong Technical Mentorship: architecture practices elevated through mentorship and technical leadership across the organization
Required qualifications:
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a senior or principal architecture role
- Proven track record designing and scaling complex, modular software systems across multiple teams and product domains
- Expertise in C++, Go, Typescript, and/or Python, with strong software design principles, debugging, and performance optimization skills
- Experience architecting real-time or embedded systems and the developer tooling to support efficiency (ideally in robotics, autonomy, aerospace, or mission-critical environments)
- Strong understanding of software lifecycle processes, including versioning, CI/CD, testing, and code health practices
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture reviews, facilitate design trade-offs, and drive cross-functional technical alignment
- Skilled in writing and reviewing technical design documents, interface specifications, and RFCs
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction at scale
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience working in autonomy, robotics, aerospace, or defense domains, especially with safety-critical or mission-assured systems
- Familiarity with autonomy development tools such as simulation frameworks, planning and control libraries, or sensor fusion pipelines
- Exposure to software certification processes (e.g., DO-178C, MIL-HDBK-516C, or ISO 26262) or high-integrity software development environments
- Exposure to DoD standards for autonomy development (e.g. OMS/UCI, JAUS, UMAA)
- Background in designing or maintaining SDKs, developer tools, or extensible platforms used by other engineering teams
- Proficiency with middleware technologies such as ROS/ROS2, or custom pub-sub communication layers
- Understanding of simulation-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies
- Experience with scalable logging, telemetry, and observability systems for deployed software in complex environments
- Strong systems thinking mindset, with the ability to reason across product, infrastructure, and algorithmic boundaries
$240,000 - $360,000 a year
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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.
