Staff Engineer, State Estimation (R5783)

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.

What you'll do:
- Research and develop state-of-the-art state estimation and navigation algorithms to enable resilient autonomy in challenging GPS-denied environments.

- Design and deploy production-grade C++ software for embedded robotic systems operating in dynamic, real-world environments.

- Build and maintain rigorous unit, integration, and system-level tests to ensure system robustness and safety.

- Develop and enhance modeling, calibration, and simulation tools for inertial and vision-based navigation systems.

- Contribute to roadmap planning, feature decomposition, and agile execution alongside a multidisciplinary team of autonomy engineers.

- Continuously enhance performance analysis, benchmarking, and validation pipelines to drive rapid innovation and improvement.

Required qualifications:
- M.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field; minimum 2+ years of related professional work experience if you have an M.S. degree, or 0 years if you are a new Ph.D. graduate.

- Professional proficiency in modern C++ (C++11 or newer) and strong object-oriented design skills.

- Hands-on experience deploying low-latency C++ applications to embedded Linux platforms.

- Professional experience designing and implementing state estimation algorithms (e.g., EKF, UKF, Particle Filters, graph-based optimization).

- Familiarity with VIO, SLAM, or multi-sensor fusion frameworks (e.g., GTSAM, Ceres, OpenVINS).

- Strong working knowledge of CI pipelines and automated testing frameworks for C++.

- Ability to independently deploy high-reliability code suitable for real-world autonomous systems.

- Familiarity with prototyping in Python or MATLAB is welcome, but this role demands professional C++ production deployment skills. Candidates whose primary experience is in MATLAB or Python are unlikely to find this position a good fit.

Preferred qualifications:
- Deep understanding of graph-based optimization for state estimation.

- Experience developing vision-aided inertial navigation systems (VINS, VIO, Terrain Relative Navigation).

- Experience with navigation sensor calibration (IMU, GPS, barometers, magnetometers, laser altimeters, cameras).

- Experience in benchmarking and system validation for real-world navigation performance.