Shield AI

Staff Cloud Engineer

Shield AI · San Diego, California
San Diego, California $150K–$230K Posted 2026-09-03
Salary
$150K–$230K
Type
Full-time
Experience
8+ 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:
Cloud Engineering builds and operates the infrastructure and environments that support Shield AI’s software products and platforms.

As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you will design, build, and operate the cloud infrastructure and environments used to develop, test, integrate, and host Shield AI’s software products and platforms. You will work across AWS infrastructure, shared development environments, and supporting platform services to improve how these systems are provisioned, operated, and maintained.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on infrastructure automation, reliability, and operational stability. You will troubleshoot problems across infrastructure and services, improve existing systems, and work with engineering teams to build infrastructure that meets their development and integration needs.

#LI-DM2
#LD

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 AWS infrastructure and shared development and integration environments
  • Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools
  • Automate environment provisioning, configuration, lifecycle management, and other recurring infrastructure tasks
  • Build and operate infrastructure supporting containerized applications and workloads
  • Establish and improve observability across cloud infrastructure and supporting services
  • Diagnose and resolve infrastructure and environment issues across products and platform services.
  • Improve the reliability and consistency of shared environments and platform services.
  • Partner with Cybersecurity, Infosec, and Enterprise Ops to implement infrastructure and access controls that meet security and compliance requirements
  • Monitor resource utilization and identify opportunities to improve infrastructure cost and capacity
  • Experience supporting shared cloud infrastructure across multiple products or engineering teams
  • Experience with Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms
  • Experience with infrastructure as code tooling
  • Experience designing automated or ephemeral environment lifecycle management
  • Experience operating infrastructure in regulated or compliance-driven environments
  • Experience implementing cloud IAM, access controls, and infrastructure security requirements
  • Experience with AWS cost management, capacity planning, or resource optimization

San Diego, CA range: $150,000 - $230,000
San Mateo, CA range: $180,000 - $280,000

AWSTerraformKubernetes
$110K — 10th pctl $265K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $190K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
~median
market rate
Based on 24,000+ 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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