Customer Sustainment Engineer - level; R5502

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 (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).

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Shield AI builds intelligent systems that protect service members and civilians. Our products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and our teams support customers and operations across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

Shield AI is hiring a Senior Customer Sustainment Engineer to support Hivemind systems after they reach customers and operational teams. This role sits at the intersection of customer support, systems troubleshooting, and engineering.

Customers and forward deployed employees bring valuable operational context when they report a mission interruption, update concern, or unexpected system behavior. You will work with them to translate that context into a clear technical problem by gathering the right evidence, understanding the operating environment, narrowing the likely causes, and identifying the best path to resolution.

Some issues will be resolved through configuration changes, deployment corrections, known workarounds, or better guidance. Others will require a product or engineering change. In either case, you will stay with the issue through resolution, keep the customer informed, and make sure the outcome is captured for future use.

The role is the primary owner for Tier 1 support, handles a meaningful portion of Tier 2 troubleshooting, and can contribute to limited Tier 3 investigation when deeper technical experience is useful. Using DoD sustainment language, this is roughly the software equivalent of intermediate-level maintenance: resolve what can be addressed at that level, identify what needs depot-level repair, and provide engineering with a complete technical handoff.

Product Support and core engineering teams provide the depot-level repair capability, while this role stays engaged to validate the result and close the loop with the customer.

You will work closely with Forward Deployment Engineering, Product Support Engineering, Operations & Sustainment, Product, Program, Licensing, and the core Hivemind engineering teams. The goal is straightforward: help customers return to mission-ready operation while making Hivemind easier to support over time.

• Own Tier 1 customer support and incident coordination from initial report through confirmed resolution.

• Gather the information needed to understand an issue, including mission impact, software version, configuration, deployment state, logs, telemetry, screenshots, network context, and reproduction steps.

• Troubleshoot Hivemind software, APIs, licensing and provisioning, deployments, configurations, networks, operator workflows, and partner or OEM integrations.

• Separate product defects from configuration problems, environmental differences, integration issues, training needs, and feature requests.

• Resolve common technical problems, handle appropriate Tier 2 investigations, and reproduce more complex failures in lab, simulation, or representative test environments.

• Recognize issues that require Tier 3 or depot-level product repair and give engineering teams concise escalation packages that explain the impact, evidence, likely causes, work already attempted, and expected result.

• Provide customers with clear updates, practical…