Principal Engineer, Ground System Software; R5199

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.

We are seeking an experienced Software Systems Engineer with a strong background in software design and development and a working knowledge of systems engineering processes, methodologies, and tools. This individual will play a key role in defining, developing, integrating, and validating complex software systems while ensuring alignment with system-level requirements, architecture, and program objectives.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical software expertise with an understanding of systems engineering principles, including requirements management, model-based systems engineering (MBSE), verification and validation, configuration management, customer communications and cross-functional technical leadership.

Software Architecture & Development

• Participate in the development of software architectures for complex, distributed, and mission-critical systems.
• Engage in software design activities from concept through deployment and sustainment.
• Work with software responsible engineers to develop and model high-quality, scalable, maintainable software solutions using modern programming languages, frameworks & System Modeling Tools.
• Develop, review and maintain architecture diagrams to support government reference architectures.
• Engage with internal stakeholders to develop software architecture behavior diagrams/documents to support customer deliverables.
• Communicate technical concepts effectively to engineering, program management, and customer stakeholders.

Systems Engineering Integration

• Collaborate with systems engineers to derive software requirements from system-level requirements and operational needs.
• Ensure software solutions maintain traceability to stakeholder, system, and subsystem requirements.
• Participate in architecture trade studies and technical decision‑making activities.
• Support system decomposition, interface definition, and allocation of requirements.
• Contribute to system design reviews including SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, and related technical milestones.
• Work closely with hardware, network, test, and integration teams to ensure end-to-end system performance.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related technical field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of software architecture or technical leadership experience.
• Proficiency in a strongly typed programming language (e.g. C#, Type Script, Java, C++) with exposure to lower‑level systems or protocol integration.
• Familiarity with software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies.
• Understanding of systems engineering processes and standards.
• Experience with requirements management and traceability practices.
• Experience using version control and CI/CD tools.

• Experience in aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, aviation, automotive, telecommunications, or other complex systems domains.
• Experience with GCS software, mission planning tools, or real‑time visualization platforms.
• Familiarity with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methodologies.
• Experience with systems engineering tools such as:
  • Cameo Systems Modeler / Magic Draw
  • IBM DOORS Next
  • Jama Connect
  • Stell
  • JIRA
  • Confluence
• Experience with cloud‑native architectures, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
• Familiarity with Autonomy Government Reference Architectures, Open Mission Systems and Universal Command & Control Interface.

• Ability to operate effectively across multiple engineering disciplines.
• Strong systems thinking and problem‑solving abilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to translate complex system requirements into practical software solutions.
• Experience balancing technical, programmatic, and…