Principal Quality Engineer - Development Programs; R5350

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 (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below). Follow Shield AI on Linked In, X, Instagram, and You Tube.

The Principal Quality Engineer serves as the senior technical quality authority for a complex aerospace development program. This role is responsible for establishing and driving quality engineering strategies that ensure products are designed, developed, tested, and transitioned to production with the highest levels of safety, reliability, manufacturability, and mission effectiveness.

The Principal Quality Engineer partners closely with Design Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Supply Chain, Flight Test, and Program Management to identify technical risks, drive root cause investigations, improve product reliability, and ensure quality is designed into the product from inception through production readiness.

As the most senior individual contributor within the quality organization, this role provides technical leadership across development programs and serves as a key advisor to engineering and executive leadership on quality and reliability matters.

• Serve as the lead quality engineering representative on a major aerospace development program.
• Establish quality engineering strategies and methodologies throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Ensure quality requirements are incorporated into system architecture, design, verification, validation, and production planning activities.
• Drive quality integration within cross-functional engineering teams.
• Provide technical leadership for complex quality and reliability challenges.

• Participate in system requirements reviews, design reviews, and technical readiness reviews.
• Assess product designs for quality, manufacturability, inspectability, maintainability, and reliability.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks associated with design maturity and product performance.
• Evaluate engineering changes and configuration modifications for quality impact.
• Champion Design for Quality (DFQ), Design for Manufacturability (DFM), and Design for Reliability (DFR) principles.

• Lead investigations of the program’s most complex failures and quality escapes.
• Apply advanced root cause methodologies to identify systemic causes of defects and failures.
• Facilitate cross-functional corrective action teams.
• Drive closure and effectiveness verification of corrective actions.
• Mentor engineering teams in structured problem-solving techniques.

• Develop reliability growth strategies and quality metrics for development programs.
• Support implementation and execution of FRACAS processes.
• Analyze failure trends, test results, field data, and operational performance.
• Identify emerging risks before they impact program objectives.
• Recommend design, process, or operational improvements to improve product robustness.

• Develop quality engineering approaches for laboratory, environmental, ground, and flight testing.
• Ensure test anomalies, failures, and nonconformances are properly evaluated and resolved.
• Support qualification and certification efforts.
• Evaluate test readiness and production readiness criteria.
• Ensure lessons learned are captured and incorporated into future designs.

• Partner with Manufacturing Engineering to develop scalable production processes.
• Support development of inspection strategies, acceptance criteria, and process controls.
• Evaluate manufacturing capability and production risks during product maturation.
• Ensure development lessons learned are translated into production controls.
• Support transition from prototype builds to low-rate and full-rate production.