Staff Cloud Engineer, Shield AI
$180-280k
+ Bonus + Equity
Office located in San Mateo, CA
Building AI aircraft pilots
Job no longer available
Building AI aircraft pilots
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$180-280k
+ Bonus + Equity
Office located in San Mateo, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
Role
Who you are
- Experience supporting shared cloud infrastructure across multiple products or engineering teams
- Experience with Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms
- Experience with infrastructure as code tooling
- Experience designing automated or ephemeral environment lifecycle management
- Experience operating infrastructure in regulated or compliance-driven environments
- Experience implementing cloud IAM, access controls, and infrastructure security requirements
- Experience with AWS cost management, capacity planning, or resource optimization
What the job involves
- Cloud Engineering builds and operates the infrastructure and environments that support Shield AI’s software products and platforms
- As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you will design, build, and operate the cloud infrastructure and environments used to develop, test, integrate, and host Shield AI’s software products and platforms
- You will work across AWS infrastructure, shared development environments, and supporting platform services to improve how these systems are provisioned, operated, and maintained
- This is a hands-on engineering role focused on infrastructure automation, reliability, and operational stability. You will troubleshoot problems across infrastructure and services, improve existing systems, and work with engineering teams to build infrastructure that meets their development and integration needs
- Design, build, and operate AWS infrastructure and shared development and integration environments
- Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools
- Automate environment provisioning, configuration, lifecycle management, and other recurring infrastructure tasks
- Build and operate infrastructure supporting containerized applications and workloads
- Establish and improve observability across cloud infrastructure and supporting services
- Diagnose and resolve infrastructure and environment issues across products and platform services
- Improve the reliability and consistency of shared environments and platform services
- Partner with Cybersecurity, Infosec, and Enterprise Ops to implement infrastructure and access controls that meet security and compliance requirements
- Monitor resource utilization and identify opportunities to improve infrastructure cost and capacity
Our take
Self-driving vehicles present enormous benefits for the transportation industry, with the potential to increase the safety and efficiency of cars, trucks, and commercial airlines. However, such technological innovation is less present within the military transportation sector, despite the benefits that AI piloting would produce for the operation of drones and aircraft.
Shield AI is developing Hivemind, an AI-driven pilot that can operate drones and aircraft autonomously, without needing GPS, communications, or pilots. In addition to navigation, the technology is also designed to facilitate indoor building clearance, integrated defence breaching, and has the ability to learn and autonomously execute aircraft missions.
Whilst similar AI-driven pilot software has begun to appear in Chinese military research programs, Shield AI's target is the US. By developing fully autonomous piloting integrations for any type of aircraft, the company aims to future-proof the US military without the need for bespoke aircraft design. It has generated massive amounts of funding to support continued scaling and R&D efforts.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 14 rounds)
Mar 2026
$1.5bn
SERIES G
Mar 2026
$500m
LATE VC
Total funding: $3.0bn
Company benefits
- Excellent Medical Coverage
- Mental Health Employee Assistance Program
- Paid Parental Leave
- Pet Insurance
- Flexible Work Hours
- Gym Discount (San Diego)
- Onsite Gym (DC)
- Free Parking
- Competitive Compensation
- 401K Services and Match
- Stock Benefits
Company HQ
Core-Columbia, San Diego, CA
Leadership
Ryan Tseng
(Co-Founder & President)Experience as CEO, CTO and Founder of WiPower from 2006 to 2010. Technical Lead for Wireless Power Program for Qualcomm from 2010 to 2013.
Brandon Tseng
(Co-Founder & President)Naval Officer for the US Navy from 2009 to 2015.
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