Staff Engineer, Test Automation - San Mateo (R5792)
San Mateo, Californiafull time
On Site
senior
H1B: no
Shield Staff Engineer, Test Automation at Shield to lead automated verification across next-generation autonomy platform. Responsible for defining test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
Responsibilities
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and 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.
The Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform. You will define and evolve test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines that enable the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments.
In this hands-on Staff role, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, establish automation and verification standards, identify systemic quality risks, and develop scalable test infrastructure. The ideal candidate combines deep Python automation and distributed-systems testing experience with technical leadership and experience validating machine learning systems throughout the data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for automated testing, verification, and MLOps quality across the Hivemind ecosystem.
Design and maintain scalable test frameworks for autonomy software, backend services, APIs, operator-facing applications, and distributed hardware environments.
Lead functional, integration, regression, system, performance, reliability, and end-to-end testing across simulation, edge-compute, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
Build automated ML validation pipelines covering data quality, training reproducibility, model accuracy, robustness, regression, latency, resource utilization, and system integration.
Establish CI/CD and continuous training workflows that provide versioning and traceability for datasets, models, configurations, evaluation results, and deployment artifacts.
Develop scenario-based validation for autonomy models, including edge cases, degraded sensing or communications, distribution shifts, and representative mission conditions.
Create observability, analytics, and failure-triage capabilities for software behavior, model and data drift, inference health, test results, and production performance.
Build Python automation that improves test execution, parallelization, reporting, environment setup, experiment comparison, and developer productivity.
Create test harnesses, simulators, stubs, mocks, and synthetic data capabilities that improve system testability and coverage.
Qualification
Demonstrated success designing testExperience with model registriesExperience validating perceptionExperience with reliability
Required
Typically 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer tooling, MLOps, systems integration, or systems verification, or an equivalent combination of experience and demonstrated impact.
5+ years of experience building scalable automation frameworks or developer tooling in Python.
Demonstrated success designing test, CI/CD, or MLOps infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
Experience validating machine learning systems across the data, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
Understanding of ML quality risks such as data leakage, training-serving skew, nondeterminism, distribution shift, drift, model regression, and statistical acceptance criteria.
Experience testing GPU-accelerated infrastructure and workloads, including GPU scheduling, allocation, utilization, and resource contention in Kubernetes environments.
Experience with performance benchmarking, profiling, and observability for GPU workloads, including identifying compute, memory, storage, networking, and data-loading bottlenecks.
Experience validating multi-tenant Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, resource quotas, workload isolation, and scheduling behavior.
Experience qualifying integrated hardware and software systems, including automated validation of compute, GPU, storage, networking, drivers, firmware, and deployed software configurations.
Strong system-design skills and experience testing distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and integrated hardware and software environments.
Experience developing integration and regression strategies for internally developed, third-party, open-source, and partner software, including dependency management, compatibility testing, and upgrades.
Preferred
Experience with model registries, experiment tracking, dataset or feature versioning, model serving, and automated artifact promotion using MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or similar platforms.
Experience with GPU scheduling and orchestration platforms such as Run:ai, NVIDIA GPU Operator, KAI Scheduler, Kueue, Volcano, or similar technologies.
Experience with NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, including CUDA, drivers, container runtimes, Multi-Instance GPU, GPU fractionalization, and hardware/software compatibility testing.
Experience with GPU profiling and performance-analysis tools such as NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, or similar technologies.
Experience validating perception, planning, decision-making, reinforcement learning, or other autonomy models in simulation and on deployed systems.
Experience testing models on embedded or edge-compute platforms, including latency, memory, power, accelerator compatibility, quantization, and hardware-specific behavior.
Experience qualifying production servers or appliances, including hardware validation, burn-in, provisioning, firmware, networking, storage, and software-stack validation before deployment.
Experience with reliability, fault-injection, and recovery testing across distributed compute, storage, networking, and GPU infrastructure.
