# Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception

**Company:** [Shield AI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/shield-ai)
**Location:** Washington, DC, Dallas, TX, San Diego, CA, Boston, MA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $234k – $351k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** PyTorch, TensorFlow, TensorRT, onnx, C++, Python, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, 3d vision, vision-language models
**Posted:** 2026-07-28

> Develop and deploy state-of-the-art vision, VLM, and VLA models for autonomous perception systems. Requires 7+ years experience (with PhD), mastery of ML and computer vision, PyTorch/TensorFlow, TensorRT/ONNX, C++/Python, and ability to obtain SECRET clearance.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do

- Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models that improve perception and decision-making for autonomous systems.
- Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission-relevant tasks.
- Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.
- Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments.
- Translate cutting-edge machine learning research into production-ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.
- Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission-ready autonomous systems.
- Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.
- Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.

## Required Qualifications

- Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 9 years and a Master’s degree; or 7 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
- Mastery of machine learning fundamentals.
- Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
- Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
- Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
- Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate research into practical applications.
- Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
- Experience with training/finetuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and/or world models.
- Contributions to open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision.
- Track record of publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).

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