# Senior Staff Engineer, Ground Systems Software

**Company:** [Shield AI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/shield-ai)
**Location:** Seattle, WA, Dallas, TX, Washington, DC
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $190k – $350k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** C#, TypeScript, Java, C++, React, Software Architecture, Systems Engineering, Mbse, Requirements Management, CI/CD, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Jira, Confluence
**Posted:** 2026-09-10

> Leads architecture, development, integration, and validation of mission-critical ground systems software for UAV and autonomous platforms. Requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, strong systems engineering knowledge, and technical leadership across multidisciplinary teams.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Develop software architectures and code for complex, distributed, mission-critical systems.
- Design, develop, integrate, validate, deploy, and sustain software solutions.
- Develop ground control software enabling low-latency communication with UAVs and autonomous platforms.
- Build high-performance client and server applications for telemetry processing, mission planning, and real-time control.
- Implement responsive operator interfaces and spatial-data, sensor-feed, and mission-state visualization.
- Collaborate across autonomy, embedded systems, backend, UX, hardware, network, test, and integration teams.
- Derive software requirements from system-level requirements and operational needs, maintaining traceability.
- Participate in architecture trade studies, system decomposition, interface definition, requirements allocation, and technical decision-making.
- Support SRR, PDR, CDR, TRR, and related technical reviews.
- Create and maintain architecture diagrams, behavior documents, customer deliverables, and Interface Control Documents.
- Communicate technical concepts to engineering, program management, and customer stakeholders.

## Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience.
- 3+ years of software architecture or technical leadership experience.
- Proficiency in a strongly typed programming language such as C#, TypeScript, Java, or C++.
- Exposure to lower-level systems or protocol integration.
- Familiarity with software development lifecycle methodologies.
- Understanding of systems engineering processes and standards.
- Experience with requirements management and traceability.
- Experience using version control and CI/CD tools.
- Strong systems thinking, problem-solving, communication, leadership, and collaboration skills.
- Ability to translate complex system requirements into practical software solutions and balance technical, programmatic, and operational constraints.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience in aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, aviation, automotive, telecommunications, or other complex systems domains.
- Experience with ground control software, mission planning tools, or real-time visualization platforms.
- Familiarity with Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).
- Experience with Cameo Systems Modeler, MagicDraw, Stell, Jira, or Confluence.
- Experience with cloud-native architectures, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
- Familiarity with Autonomy Government Reference Architectures (A-GRA), Open Mission Systems (OMS), or Universal Command & Control Interface.

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