Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With nine offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the 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.
Shield AI’s Hivemind Product Engineering team is seeking a Senior Director of Systems Engineering to establish and scale mature systems engineering practices across our autonomy product portfolio. This leader will build and formalize the processes, frameworks, and technical approaches that ensure our autonomy stack is delivered with rigor, traceability, and predictability, while enabling our teams to move aggressively and innovate at speed.
Success in this role requires disciplined urgency: the ability to enforce rigor, certification-ready practices, and engineering discipline without slowing down the mission. The Senior Director will be accountable for driving technical excellence while ensuring we can deliver autonomy capabilities on timelines that meet the needs of critical customer missions.
The Senior Director will own the definition of requirements, architecture, verification/validation, and certification-ready processes, with respective Hivemind Product and Engineering teams partnering to support this mandate. This role requires both strategic leadership and hands-on systems engineering expertise, with a mandate to conform our practices to the level expected of safety-critical autonomy products.
A critical dimension of this mandate is embedding cybersecurity into every layer of our processes and products, ensuring that requirements, architectures, and verifications systematically account for cyber resilience alongside safety and airworthiness.