Senior Staff Software Engineer - Test - Shield AI

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company whose mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, Shield AI is building the world’s best AI pilot. Its AI pilot, Hivemind, has flown a fighter jet (F-16), a vertical takeoff and landing drone (V-BAT), and a quadcopter (Nova). The company has offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington DC and abroad. Shield AI’s products and people are currently in the field actively supporting operations with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies. 

As part of the Hivemind Commander (HMC) team, you’ll play an active role in enhancing the quality of our products by defining best practices, managing testing infrastructure, and writing and executing manual and automated tests. You’ll collaborate cross-functionally with engineers and technical leadership, designers, product and program managers, and manual testers and integrators to deliver highly reliable, fault tolerant software to command and control autonomous aircraft. Your overarching objective is to make it easier for software engineers to write tests, product managers and designers to track test results, and to improve the overall quality and reliability of our products to protect service members and civilians with AI systems.

What Youll Do:

• Own the depth and breadth of software quality assurance activities across our web and desktop applications for mission planning and command and control.

• Drive development of high-level testing plans that align with business and technical roadmaps with clear objectives, measurables, and milestones.

• Identify, implement, integrate and automate optimal test frameworks and testing strategies.

• Define best practices for creating automated tests and writing testable code.

• Integrate testing within the application codebase with analysis of data and logs from simulated and real-world flight tests with autonomous platforms; enable the identification and tracking of bugs based on flight tests, and enhance test coverage to address bugs in the future.

• Maintain and enhance testing infrastructure and tools.

• Implement and measure key performance metrics for applications from both

• engineering and UX perspectives.

• Work with product stakeholders to define key metrics for application quality.

• Execute performance tests on application interfaces to identify degradation in quality or performance.

• Ensure execution of various quality assurance activities, including test planning, testing and risk assessment for all features.

• Track, monitor, and report on the evolution of test results over time and across releases.

Required Qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience with focus on quality assurance, testing, and automation.

• Strong programming skills in C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, React, Python, or equivalent coding languages. 

• Proven experience creating automation frameworks and tools to support test

• automation for web and desktop projects.

• Demonstrated ability to own quality assurance and automation initiatives and drive issues to resolution.

• You are excited to jump into new technologies and paradigms.

• Strong technical collaboration and a strong sense of responsibility and ability to adapt to high-intensity work in a fast-paced environment.

• Demonstrates day-to-day grit, ability to be rigorous and go fast, being a trustworthy teammate, and being kind to others.

• Experience with Git, code management tools, and Visual Studio Code.

• Good software hygiene regarding code documentation, unit testing, bug tracking.

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related degree or technical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience testing performant TypeScript/React apps.

• Experience with code analysis tools like SonarQube, Klocwork, Coverity

• Experience with Docker and CI/CD environments.

• Familiarity with WebSockets and Electron (or similar).

• Experience with team leadership, or as a technical project lead.

• Professional experience with Linux environments.

• Experience with MapLibre or another map library/framework.

• Proficient in OpenGL.

$178,586.80 - $267,880.20 a year