Senior C++ Engineer – Foundations (R6023)
- Salary
- USD 120,000 - 190,000 / per-year-salary
- Level
- Senior
- Work type
- On-site · San Diego
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
Shield AI's standard text
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 www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
Shield AI is seeking a Senior Engineer to help design and develop the middleware framework upon which Shield AI autonomy is developed. As part of the Hivemind Foundations team, you’ll focus on building the high-performant, reliable, and robust foundational layer of the Hivemind SDK, EdgeOS. The Hivemind Foundations team ensures that autonomous systems have the functionality required to deploy to platforms operating in some of the most restrictive and demanding environments around the world.
They also create the tools that enable autonomy engineers develop, understand, debug, and rapidly iterate on complex autonomous systems.
What you'll do:
- Own the architecture and implementation of features critical to EdgeOS and EdgeOS RT middleware.
- Develop runtime services and abstractions that operate across Linux, real-time operating system, and resource-constrained computing platforms.
- Design and develop the tooling used to evaluate, observe, and debug autonomous systems.
- Contribute to and extend EdgeOS Language, Hivemind’s interface definition language, which defines how data is represented within autonomous systems, between agents, and with third-party systems.
- Collaborate closely with autonomy, systems, simulation, and test engineers to deliver capabilities from initial design to integration.
- Raise the engineering bar though design and code reviews, technical guidance, documentation, and mentorship.
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
- Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years with a Master’s; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
- Strong proficiency in C++11 or newer in a production environment.
- Experience designing, developing, and debugging multithreaded systems.
- Experience developing software for real time operating systems and embedded platforms.
- Strong understanding of systems programming concepts, including concurrency, memory management, resource constraints, and performance optimization.
- Experience writing automated tests and clear technical documentation.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with C++17 or newer standards.
- Experience writing MISRA C++ or comparable coding standards for safety-critical or airborne systems.
- Experience with systems engineering design principles and requirements.
- Experience software assurance frameworks such as DO-178C.
- Familiarity with ROS2 or similar robotics frameworks.
- Experience with interface definition languages, serialization systems, or code-generation tooling.
- Knowledge of CMake and Nix build systems.
- Experience profiling and debugging complex software across multiple hardware and operating-system environments.
#LI-KC3
#LC
Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
Shield AI's standard text
###
Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
CMake · ROS
Rare in Shield AI's other 299 open postings.
78% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Shield AI's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with Shield AI's other open jobs.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 36 open in Engineering. 26 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in July: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (27 of 36), C++ (22 of 36), Linux (14 of 36), CI/CD (8 of 36), Golang (8 of 36), Kubernetes (6 of 36), PyTorch (6 of 36)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Staff Engineer, Modelling and Simulation (R6248) posted Oct 17
- Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245) posted Oct 17
- Manager, Visual Design - Synthetic Reality Development posted Oct 16
- Staff Engineer, Hivemind Reasoning (R6292) posted Oct 15
- Senior Manager, Engineering - Hivemind Reasoning (R6291) posted Oct 15
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy & Motion Planning posted Oct 10
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge (R6244) posted Oct 10
- Senior Principal Engineer, GNC & State Estimation (R6233) posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Full-Stack – Forge (R6232) posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack, Frontend Focus - Forge Applications (R6231) posted Oct 9
- Staff Autonomy Integration Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Autonomy Behaviors posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineering Manager posted Oct 9
- Systems Test Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Software Engineer, Software Integration & Test posted Oct 9
- Staff Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Oct 8
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035) posted Oct 3
- Perception Engineer - Multimodal & Embodied AI (R6022) posted Oct 3
- Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159) posted Oct 3
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge Platform, Tools (R5790) posted Sep 26
- Senior Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Aircraft Trajectory Modeling (R5787) posted Sep 26
- Staff Deep Learning Engineer, State Estimation (R5785) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, State Estimation (R5783) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019) posted Sep 22
- Autonomy Engineer- Behavior and Motion Planning (R6007) posted Sep 16
- Autonomy & Perception Software Engineer (R5911) posted Sep 9
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted Aug 31
- Staff Engineer, Data Platform (R5659) posted Aug 26
- Discrete Planning Engineer (R5440) posted Jul 24
- Staff Engineer, Core Platform Integration (R5411) posted Jul 23
- Senior Staff Engineer, Software Autonomy (R5125) posted Jun 4
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted May 14
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Sep 30
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Jul 8
From the team and dates on Shield AI's own job board.
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