Senior Director, Hivemind Operations & Sustainment; R5855

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). Follow Shield AI on Linked In, X, Instagram, and You Tube.

The Senior Director of Operations & Sustainment (O&S) is responsible for ensuring customers successfully deploy, operate, maintain, and evolve the company’s software and VIDAR hardware products throughout their lifecycle. O&S owns the post-development operational ecosystem that enables Hivemind Vision (HMV) integrated VIDAR, Hivemind Enterprise (HME) software and the Hivemind Solutions (HMS) service to scale while maintaining exceptional customer satisfaction.

This is an exciting opportunity to build the Hivemind O&S organization from the ground up. The organization serves as the bridge between Product Engineering, Customer Success, and Field Operations by enabling successful product deployment, sustaining operational readiness, providing technical support, capturing customer feedback, and driving continuous improvement.

This role sits at the center of all Hivemind business lines, ensuring customer satisfaction post-delivery. This is a hands‑on leadership role that requires both strong systems engineering instincts and the organizational discipline to build a team and establish the processes, systems, and engineering rigor necessary to support a growing customer base while ensuring issues rapidly inform future product development.

Establish the organization, practices, tools, and ways of working which manage the following:

• Lead teams responsible for installation, integration, and operational deployment of the HME Software within customer environments.
• Develop repeatable deployment methodologies, tools, and best practices that reduce deployment timelines and improve customer outcomes.
• Support direct HME customers integrating and building upon the HME, HMS teams delivering customized customer solutions, and HMV customers integrating VIDAR and associated software.

• Own the strategy and execution for customer education and operational knowledge management.
• Maintain and continuously improve training curriculum, technical publications, installation guides, troubleshooting documentation, and operational manuals.
• Develop knowledge transfer materials that enable customers to effectively deploy, configure, maintain, troubleshoot, and enhance their systems.
• Produce technical content and playbooks for Forward Deployed Engineers, Customer Support Engineers, and field personnel to resolve recurring issues and efficiently collect diagnostic data.

• Lead engineering efforts supporting products operating in customer environments.
• Track and manage customer configurations and upgrades.
• Provide technical expertise for deployment support, issue resolution, and operational readiness.
• Ensure technical issues are documented, reproduced, prioritized, and communicated effectively to HMV, HME, and HMS Engineering organizations.
• Drive root cause analysis and corrective actions that improve product reliability and customer experience.

• Drive rapid validation and verification activities supporting customer‑critical hardware repairs, bug fixes and software updates.
• Develop lightweight but rigorous test methodologies for sustaining engineering changes.
• Coordinate closely…