Principal Engineer, Security Architect (R5056)
Shield AI
IT
San Diego, CA, USA
USD 180k-270k / year + Equity
Posted on Jun 5, 2026
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the 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 hiring a Security Architect to own the technical security design across Enterprise Operations. You will be the senior individual contributor who translates our strategic roadmap into concrete reference architectures and engineering guardrails across zero trust, identity, integration, manufacturing and operational technology, cloud, the data and AI platform, and Enterprise Operations. Your designs will hold up under CMMC, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and DoD customer scrutiny.
What you'll do:
- Own the end-to-end security reference architecture across Enterprise Operations, cloud, and manufacturing environments, from whiteboard to deployed control.
- Design and enforce zero trust and secure-by-design patterns for users, workloads, and machine identities.
- Lead the identity and access re-architecture, including conditional access, privileged access, machine identity, and access controls for controlled technical data.
- Define the security architecture of the enterprise integration backbone so data flowing between engineering, manufacturing, and business systems is authenticated, authorized, and monitored by default.
- Build the security architecture for digital manufacturing and operational technology, including segmentation, secure remote access, secure build and firmware pipelines, and protection of regulated technical data.
- Industrialize cloud and infrastructure security through hardened landing zones, infrastructure-as-code guardrails, workload hardening, and continuous compliance evidence.
- Architect controls for the data and AI platform, including data classification, model protection, and guardrails for internal and customer-facing AI.
- Strengthen Enterprise Operations through tooling rationalization, telemetry coverage, runbooks, and an architecture review function that scales with the company.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in security engineering or architecture.
- Prior security architect experience at a defense, aerospace, robotics, or autonomy company shipping hardware and software to government customers.
- Defense compliance: CMMC, NIST 800-171, ISO 27001, SOC 2.
- U.S. citizenship.
- Active U.S. government security clearance, or ability to obtain and maintain one.
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Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
180000 - 270000 USD a year