Shield AI · 5 hours ago
Software Engineer, Backend (R4025)
San Diego, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$156K/yr - $333K/yrShield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. As a Software Engineer on the Forge Platform Applications team, you will build systems and tools for autonomy engineers, focusing on AI-first developer tools and platform capabilities for complex autonomy workflows.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Autonomous VehiclesDronesMachine LearningNational Security
Responsibilities
Design and implement backend services, APIs, and workflows that support autonomy development, including learning, evaluation, simulation, and operational analysis
Build and operate systems for orchestrating jobs and tasks across distributed environments, including containerized and clustered execution
Approach feature development from an AI-first perspective, designing tools around how autonomy engineers reason about data, models, performance, and failure modes
Develop tooling and interfaces that visualize and make sense of high dimensional, time varying autonomy data such as telemetry, live outputs, learning artifacts, and simulation results
Contribute to notebook driven and analysis oriented workflows that support experimentation, debugging, and iteration
Collaborate with product, customer engagement, autonomy, and platform teams to refine workflows and tooling based on operational feedback and evolving user needs
Own features from design through delivery, with a strong bias toward usability, clarity, and iteration speed
Improve reliability and developer experience through testing, documentation, examples, and thoughtful system design
Qualification
Required
Strong understanding of reinforcement learning workflows end to end, preferably in robotics or autonomy contexts
Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production backend systems
Fluency in backend development, including API design, service ownership, and data modeling
Experience building or operating task and job orchestration systems for data or ML workloads
Deep care for developer experience and user experience when building internal platforms or developer tools
Ability to take initiative, move quickly, and operate effectively in a fast paced environment
Preferred
Experience with Go in production systems
Experience with containerized and distributed systems such as Docker, Kubernetes, or similar orchestration platforms
Comfort with notebook based workflows for experimentation, analysis, and debugging
Background in startups or early stage teams, including founder or founding engineer experience
Experience building visualization heavy or analysis oriented tooling for complex datasets
Experience delivering software in constrained, secure, or operationally sensitive environments
Benefits
Bonus
Benefits
Equity
Temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Company
Shield AI
Shield AI is a deep-tech company that focuses on developing AI-powered systems to enhance the safety of service members and civilians.
Founded in 2015
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Shield AI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (3)
2024 (3)
2021 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$1.31BKey Investors
Hercules CapitalUS Innovative Technology FundSnowpoint Ventures
2025-03-06Series F· $240M
2023-12-29Debt Financing· $200M
2023-10-31Series F· $300M
Leadership Team
Gary Steele
Chief Executive Officer
Brandon Tseng
Co-Founder
Recent News
Morningstar.com
2026-01-19
Dynamic Business
2026-01-19
Washington Technology
2026-01-11
Company data provided by crunchbase