Senior Engineer, Software (R6010)

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 Senior or Staff Software Engineer to join our Developer Experience Engineering team.  The Developer Experience team owns the tools, platforms, and practices that shape how engineers build software for Hivemind. This includes local development environments, devcontainers, our internal developer platform, project templates, and approaches that enable co-development and inner-source collaboration across engineering teams.  You will build tools and paved paths that make development faster, more consistent, and more reliable. A near-term focus for this role will be bringing agentic AI capabilities into our developer tools and workflows in ways that deliver meaningful, measurable value to engineers.  This is a hands-on engineering role with broad organizational impact. You will partner directly with developers, identify recurring sources of friction, turn ambiguous needs into durable solutions, and drive adoption through documentation, advocacy, and close collaboration. You will care about engineering productivity and use signals such as DORA metrics and developer feedback to guide priorities and measure outcomes.  This position may be filled at the Senior or Staff level based on the candidate’s experience, demonstrated technical leadership, and scope of impact. 

What you'll do:

Design, build, and operate tools and platforms that improve the end-to-end Hivemind developer experience 

Advance local development workflows, devcontainers, internal developer platforms, project templates, and other reusable engineering capabilities 

Bring agentic AI capabilities into developer tools and workflows, evaluating opportunities and turning promising ideas into reliable, practical solutions 

Partner with engineering teams to understand developer needs, identify recurring friction, and create paved paths that improve productivity without limiting appropriate flexibility 

Enable co-development and inner-source collaboration through accessible tooling, documentation, standards, and contribution practices 

Drive adoption of developer tools by working closely with engineers, gathering feedback, providing guidance, and clearly communicating their value 

Own solutions through discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement 

Use DORA metrics, developer feedback, adoption data, and other signals to understand outcomes and guide investment 

Contribute to technical direction through design reviews, architectural decisions, thoughtful tradeoffs, and collaboration across engineering teams 

At the Staff level, lead cross-team initiatives, establish longer-term technical direction, and influence how Hivemind approaches developer productivity at organizational scale 

Required qualifications:

4+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience 

Demonstrated technical judgment in the design and operation of developer tools, platforms, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, or related production software 

Experience owning software from initial design through deployment, operation, adoption, and continuous improvement 

Systems thinking and the ability to turn recurring or ambiguous developer needs into coherent, reusable solutions 

Strong customer orientation toward internal developers and an interest in understanding and improving how engineering work gets done 

Effective collaboration and communic …