Senior Principal Architect, Hivemind Product (R3667)
Shield AI
Key responsibilities:
- Drive architectural strategy and design across the Hivemind product portfolio
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define system interfaces and integration patterns
- Design and enforce software patterns, modularization strategies, and APIs to ensure reliability and maintainability across platforms
- Evaluate and prototype new technologies to improve system performance and resilience
- Mentor engineering teams, review critical code and design documents, and guide implementation consistency
- Support rigorous testing and validation processes to meet deployment and safety-critical standards
- Contribute to long-term platform roadmaps with an emphasis on modular architecture, autonomy reuse, and mission flexibility
Key outcomes:
- Robust Interface Design: clear, versioned API and data contracts that enable independent development and reduce integration risk
- Architecture Review Process: a lightweight, consistent design review mechanism that improves decision quality and technical alignment
- Improved Developer Velocity: streamlined codebases and architectural clarity leading to faster iteration and easier onboarding
- Simulation-Ready Components: components designed for deterministic testing and simulation, enabling high-confidence validation and automation
- Reduced Technical Debt: bottlenecks identified and refactored, increasing system reliability and maintainability
- Cross-Team Alignment: engineering teams aligned around a shared architectural vision, improving collaboration and delivery consistency
- Strong Technical Mentorship: architecture practices elevated through mentorship and technical leadership across the organization
Required qualifications:
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in a senior or principal architecture role
- Proven track record designing and scaling complex, modular software systems across multiple teams and product domains
- Expertise in C++, Go, Typescript, and/or Python, with strong software design principles, debugging, and performance optimization skills
- Experience architecting real-time or embedded systems and the developer tooling to support efficiency (ideally in robotics, autonomy, aerospace, or mission-critical environments)
- Strong understanding of software lifecycle processes, including versioning, CI/CD, testing, and code health practices
- Demonstrated ability to lead architecture reviews, facilitate design trade-offs, and drive cross-functional technical alignment
- Skilled in writing and reviewing technical design documents, interface specifications, and RFCs
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction at scale
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience working in autonomy, robotics, aerospace, or defense domains, especially with safety-critical or mission-assured systems
- Familiarity with autonomy development tools such as simulation frameworks, planning and control libraries, or sensor fusion pipelines
- Exposure to software certification processes (e.g., DO-178C, MIL-HDBK-516C, or ISO 26262) or high-integrity software development environments
- Exposure to DoD standards for autonomy development (e.g. OMS/UCI, JAUS, UMAA)
- Background in designing or maintaining SDKs, developer tools, or extensible platforms used by other engineering teams
- Proficiency with middleware technologies such as ROS/ROS2, or custom pub-sub communication layers
- Understanding of simulation-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies
- Experience with scalable logging, telemetry, and observability systems for deployed software in complex environments
- Strong systems thinking mindset, with the ability to reason across product, infrastructure, and algorithmic boundaries