Shield AI

Senior Engineer, Software

Shield AI · San Diego, California
San Diego, California $120K–$190K Posted 2026-09-09
Salary
$120K–$190K
Type
Full-time
Experience
4+ yr

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:
Hivemind is looking for an experienced Full Stack Software Engineer to join our Shared Services Engineering team.
The Shared Services team builds and operates common services, SDKs, APIs, and customer-facing applications that connect Shield’s products. These capabilities reduce duplicated engineering and help create a consistent Shield experience across product types.
You will work across the stack, from customer-facing web applications to backend services and product integrations. You will partner with product and engineering teams to understand shared needs, turn ambiguous problems into durable solutions, and own your work from design through production operation.
This is a product-oriented engineering role with meaningful technical ownership. You will help shape new capabilities, contribute to architectural decisions, and build secure, reliable systems for external customers and internal engineering teams.

#LI-DM2
#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 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.

  • Design, build, and operate full-stack applications, backend services, SDKs, and APIs
  • Contribute to shared authentication, telemetry integrations, the Customer Support Portal, and future public telemetry APIs
  • Partner with product and engineering teams to understand shared needs and develop reusable capabilities
  • Establish secure, reliable, documented, and versioned interfaces for internal engineering teams and external customers
  • Own solutions through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support
  • Contribute to technical direction through design reviews, thoughtful tradeoffs, and collaboration with other engineers
  • 4+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience
  • Demonstrated technical judgment in the design and operation of full-stack applications, backend services, APIs, or distributed systems
  • Systems thinking and the ability to turn recurring or ambiguous needs into coherent, reusable solutions
  • Track record of owning production software from initial design through operation and continuous improvement
  • Effective collaboration and communication across engineering, product, and organizational stakeholders
  • Experience creating shared capabilities adopted across multiple products or engineering teams
  • Depth in one or more relevant domains, such as identity and authentication, public APIs and SDKs, or OpenTelemetry and high-volume telemetry data
  • Experience building modern web applications and the backend services that support them
  • Experience building and operating secure, reliable software in regulated or compliance-driven environments

San Diego, CA pay range: $120,000 - $190,000
San Mateo, CA pay range: $150,000 - $230,000

$110K — 10th pctl $270K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $155K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
-15%
below median
Based on 10,000+ Engineering roles with disclosed salary ranges tracked on NewJob.
Shield AI

Shield AI

Defense Tech · Private · San Diego, USA

Stage & Valuation
Private · $12.7B
Key Investors
Andreessen Horowitz, L3Harris, Advent International
Open roles on NewJob
Most hiring in
Engineering (174) · BizOps (23) · Operations (19)
Shield AI is a defense technology company that builds AI pilots and next-generation autonomous aircraft to protect service members and civilians. Their core product is Hivemind, an AI-powered autonomy developer platform for military systems.
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