Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245)

Shield, San Diego, CA

The role

The Lead Edge Applications and Mission System is responsible to drive the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our edge application platform for autonomous systems. This platform connects operators, autonomous platforms, mission data, and external command-and-control systems, supporting applications ranging from single-vehicle ground control to coordinated fleet operations and theater-level mission planning and execution.

What you will do

- Own the platform architecture. Define and evolve the architecture across operator applications, backend services, mission data, integration interfaces, and edge deployment environments. Establish boundaries that allow teams to deliver capabilities independently while maintaining a coherent product.
Enable the full range of mission applications. Guide the evolution from single-vehicle GCS workflows to multi-vehicle supervision, heterogeneous fleet operations, and applications supporting theater-level planning, execution monitoring, and battlespace management.
Make customer extensibility a core capability. Establish APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, and integration tooling that help customers and partners add platforms, data sources, applications, and workflows quickly. Preserve compatibility as the platform evolves.
Lead C2 and BMS interoperability. Guide integration with external mission systems and comparable defense C2 environments. Enable the aggregation and exchange of vehicle state, mission information, sensor-derived data, and operational context.
Advance operator and agentic workflows. Partner with autonomy, AI, product, and design teams to deliver intuitive planning, supervision, execution, and debrief experiences. Define clear operator authority, approval boundaries, observability, and evaluation criteria for AI-assisted workflows.
Own fleet and configuration architecture. Establish capabilities for asset inventory, readiness and health monitoring, software and configuration versioning, compatibility management, controlled updates, rollback, and traceability across deployed autonomous systems.
Engineer for edge applications in contested environment. Design for intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, distributed state, and recovery from partial failures. Ensure useful and predictable behavior in disconnected and degraded environments.
Drive the technical roadmap and execution. Translate product strategy, customer needs, and operational feedback into architectural priorities, milestones, and measurable deliverables. Resolve dependencies and make explicit tradeoffs among near-term delivery, platform investment, reliability, and technical debt.
Lead products through customer deployment. Partner with integration, test, field, and customer teams from initial requirements through acceptance, deployment, and sustainment. Use field experience, telemetry, and customer feedback to improve subsequent releases.

Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245)

The role

Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245)

The role

What you will do

What you need

Nice to have

Full-time regular employee offer package

Temporary employee offer package

About Shield

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