Senior Staff Electrical Engineer, Shield AI
$170-260k
+ Bonus & Equity
Building AI aircraft pilots
Be an early applicant
Building AI aircraft pilots
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$170-260k
+ Bonus & Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering; or equivalent work experience
- You have 8+ years of industry experience as an Electrical Engineer
- Strong technical fundamentals
- Contributed to and led multiple product design cycles involving EE, ME, and SW engineering
- Demonstrated track record of extreme ownership, working hard, and delivering outstanding outcomes
- A track record of successfully shipping products, showcasing the ability to navigate through development cycles, overcome obstacles, and deliver high-quality solutions to meet project deadlines and exceed expectations in a fast-paced environment
- Proactively identify opportunities for improvement within hardware development projects, demonstrating initiative to propose and implement innovative solutions that enhance efficiency, quality, and overall project success and aircraft reliability
What the job involves
- Help build the technology behind the next generation of autonomous aircraft. In this role, you will lead the design and development of advanced electrical systems, working across hardware, software, and mechanical teams to deliver innovative, high-performance solutions from concept through production
- Lead circuit design and sub-system design for our next generation aircraft and its support equipment. This includes complex system architectures utilizing custom circuitry (FPGAs, power management, analog, digital, servos, microcontrollers, sensors, radios, etc.)
- Support the design and integration of complex embedded systems and sensors which enable aircraft autonomy and AI
- Help define technical product requirements and features
- Lead and mentor teammates working on the same project
- Own circuit part selection, schematic capture, simulation, analysis, verification, debugging, and release to production
- Coordinate with cross-functional teams (mechanical, embedded, software, manufacturing, supply chain, etc.)
- Manage your project timelines and deliverables
- Conduct and attend cross-functional design reviews
- Work closely with Firmware to integrate applicable logic designs into the build/release cycle
- Provide feedback to other teams where applicable
- Help develop automated test solutions
- Proactively identify opportunities for improvement within hardware development projects, demonstrating initiative to propose and implement innovative solutions that enhance efficiency, quality, and overall project success and aircraft reliability
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 defense 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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 40 more jobs at Shield AI