Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy & Motion Planning
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- On-site · Bengaluru
Not stated in the posting: salary, visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
This position on the Autonomy team in India will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviors into our products, acting as technical leads, senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect candidates to demonstrate unparalleled end-to-end outcome ownership, driving the architecting, design, delivery, support, and evolution of safe and effective mission autonomy software throughout the entire product lifecycle.
What you'll do:
- Develop tactical autonomy software to enable unmanned platforms to perform complex missions across air, land, sea, and space domains with minimal human supervision
- Implement and test behaviors that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios
- Work throughout the entire of the software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilizing tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development
- Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and to enable reuse of behaviors across multiple projects and portfolios
- Utilize your software and systems expertise to architect behaviors as scalable software subsystems, that may interact directly or indirectly with a breadth of system components (e.g., sensor processing, state estimation, peer-to-peer communications, contingency management, actuation, and payload interfacing)
- Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms (whether internally and externally owned), with a clear path towards architecture and capability evolution over time
- Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts (e.g., fighter pilots, UAV operators, etc.)
- Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment including engineering, business and sales leadership.
- Travel to co-locate with end-users and/or other teams up to 20% of the time
Required qualifications:
- BS /MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
- Proficient in production-level C++ software development
- 7+ years' experience in one or more of the following: software sub-system scheduling and integration, behavior planning, task and resource allocation, motion planning, optimization, or flight controls
- Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management
- Proven ability to lead multi-disciplinary teams, set technical direction, and manage full project lifecycles from concept to deployment
- Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity
- Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment
- Capacity to act as the technical owner for an entire software system, including stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, roadmap management, team co-ordination, design, implementation, sustainment, and evolution
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready
- Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations
- Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to:
- Collaborative mission planning, behavior planning, synchronized teaming
- Automated red force vs blue force tactics
- Motion planning across a variety of vehicle classes, kinematic constraints, and team compositions
- Weapons target assignment, Sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws
- Collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring
- Experience in more than one operational effect (e.g., strike, air combat, surveillance,
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
- 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 C++ Engineer – Foundations (R6023) 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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