Senior Staff Engineer, System Architect (R5843)

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: Shield AI is seeking an experienced System Architect to own the architecture of Hivemind Forge – an AI development ecosystem and the segment of Hivemind that enables developers to build, train, tune, evaluate, optimize, and deploy learning-based autonomy solutions. You will join the Systems Engineering, Integration, & Test (SEIT) team in the Hivemind Enterprise organization. This ecosystem combines developer tools, APIs, data infrastructure, simulation, AI/ML workflows, and GenAI-enabled automation to accelerate the delivery of autonomous capabilities using Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, world models, foundation models, and other applied AI technologies. As the responsible architect, you will define the comprehensive architecture for this product area, maintain architectural integrity across development teams, and ensure the ecosystem can operate across enterprise cloud, high-performance computing, and secure or disconnected deployment environments. You will work at the intersection of software architecture, AI/ML, data architecture, systems engineering, developer experience, and Generative AI-enabled engineering to create an ecosystem that dramatically reduces the time required to transform mission needs and data into deployable, intelligent autonomous capabilities.

What you'll do:

Own and evolve the architecture of the Hivemind Forge AI development ecosystem.

Define and maintain architecture products in an integrated model-based systems engineering (MBSE) environment, connecting architectural intent to engineering execution.

Establish architectural patterns, interfaces, APIs, SDK concepts, and technical standards across software, AI/ML, data, simulation, and deployment capabilities.

Define the data and metadata architecture underpinning the AI development lifecycle, including schemas, relationships, lineage, provenance, versioning, and lifecycle management.

Ensure traceable pedigree across datasets, training configurations, model artifacts, evaluations, software versions, and deployed capabilities to support reproducibility and auditability.

Architect GenAI-enabled and agentic development workflows that accelerate data curation, autonomy development, experimentation, evaluation, troubleshooting, and deployment while preserving human oversight, security, verification, and traceability.

Define architectural patterns for integrating AI coding assistants, agents, foundation models, and natural-language interfaces with Hivemind development tools, APIs, SDKs, data, simulation, and engineering workflows.

Define architecture for scalable AI/ML workloads across cloud, high-performance compute (HPC), and on-premises infrastructure, including orchestration, workload scheduling, containerization, storage, and data movement.

Ensure the ecosystem can be deployed and operated in classified, air-gapped, disconnected, and other constrained enterprise environments while preserving security, configuration control, and reproducibility.

Ensure AI-assisted and agentic development workflows preserve appropriate provenance, traceability, human oversight, verification, security, and reproducibility, particularly when contributing to deployed autonomous capabilities.

Guide architecture for workflows spanning data ingestion and curation, synthetic data generation, model training and tuning, evaluation, optimization, validation, and deployment.

Review and approve detaile …