# Principal Engineer, Software Architect (R4562)

**Company:** [Shield AI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/shield-ai)
**Location:** Dallas, TX
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $216k – $323k/yr
**Skills:** Software Architecture, Safety-Critical Systems, Cybersecurity, APIs, CI/CD, Static Analysis, Real-Time Systems, Autonomy Software, Mission Planning, Avionics Integration
**Posted:** 2026-02-13

> Leads software architecture for Shield AI's XBAT program across mission, vehicle, and autonomy domains for advanced airborne systems. Translates safety/security goals into designs, drives cross-team alignment, and ensures scalability and compliance in safety-critical environments.

## Job Description

## What You’ll Do

- Define and evolve the system-wide software architecture for XBAT, spanning airborne vehicle, ground station, and autonomy layers.
- Translate safety and security goals into technical requirements, standards, and design patterns that guide engineers across multiple software teams.
- Ensure architecture supports safety-critical and cyber-relevant workflows, including formalizing architecture decisions, traceability, and compliance pathways appropriate for advanced airborne systems.
- Drive cross-team alignment on APIs, data flows, fault handling, verification strategy, and risk management so mission, vehicle, and autonomy components integrate cleanly.
- Partner with engineering leadership, system architects, and validation teams to balance innovation speed with rigorous assurance practices.
- Set technical direction for long-term scalability: modularity, maintainability, testability, and support for future capability growth or certification needs.
- Mentor senior engineers and architects, raising the bar for design rigor, documentation quality, and architectural judgment across the organization.
- Produce and maintain architecture artifacts: high-level system diagrams, component interfaces, data models, risk analyses, and design rationales.
- Lead technical reviews for major features, changes, or integration points; ensure alignment with architectural standards and safety/security constraints.
- Define architecture governance: decision records, change control processes, quality gates, and collaboration flows among development, verification, and operations.
- Collaborate with systems, hardware, and avionics teams to manage boundaries, timing, resource allocation, and failure modes that affect overall aircraft and mission performance.
- Drive technology evaluation and roadmap: select or validate frameworks, middleware, and tooling that meet performance, assurance, and cyber-hardening needs.
- Support external or internal readiness evaluations: provide architectural evidence, participate in reviews, and help the program articulate compliance posture as requirements evolve.
- Advocate for continuous improvement in architecture practice: metrics, architecture reviews, knowledge sharing, and onboarding for new team members.

## Required Qualifications

- Deep expertise in software architecture for complex, multi-domain systems—ideally aerospace, defense, autonomous systems, or similarly safety-critical fields.
- Proven track record designing and delivering production software that must satisfy stringent safety, security, or mission assurance requirements.
- Strong systems thinking: able to navigate tradeoffs across performance, latency, reliability, testability, and certification or compliance considerations.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to convey architecture vision and rationale to engineers, program leads, and stakeholders.
- Experience driving architecture adoption and discipline across multiple teams, not just authoring designs in isolation.
- **Bachelor’s or advanced degree** in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace, or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Familiarity with aerospace software assurance frameworks or standards that guide high-assurance airborne software development.
- Experience working on or integrating autonomy, mission planning, or AI-enabled software into real-world systems.
- Strong understanding of cyber hardening and secure design practices for distributed or networked vehicle systems and ground infrastructure.
- Prior leadership or mentor role with responsibility for building and scaling architecture practices and design culture in a fast-moving engineering organization.
- Experience dealing with constrained platforms: real-time requirements, limited compute, or avionics-style integration challenges.
- Hands-on experience in VTOL or other advanced aircraft programs, or in programs that require austere operations, long-range operations, or resilient autonomy.
- Exposure to end-to-end product lifecycle from concept through flight test or operational deployment.
- Practical knowledge of modern software tooling that supports traceability, **CI/CD**, automated verification, static analysis, or high-assurance pipelines.
- Comfort working in a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment where requirements can evolve quickly and architecture must adapt without losing rigor.

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