Staff Engineer, Systems Safety (R4823)

San Diego, California

Hivemind Platform Division – Engineering /

Full Time Employee /

On-site

Founded in 2015, 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 and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. 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.

Job Description:

This role is hands-on and highly collaborative, requiring experience with safety-critical software systems and familiarity with airborne software safety processes (DO-178C, ARP4761, ARP4754A, and/or MIL-HDBK-516C). It requires strong software system intuition, and a software engineering background. You will serve as a safety authority across the Hivemind platform team, ensuring that safety considerations are built into architecture decisions, requirements, code, and verification strategies from the outset - not bolted on at the end.

What you'll do:

Safety requirements development:
Derive and author safety requirements from system-level hazard analyses, functional hazard assessments (FHAs), and customer/regulatory safety objectives.
Translate safety requirements into clear, testable software requirements aligned with the appropriate Design Assurance Level (DAL) or software criticality classification.
Collaborate with requirements engineers, system architects, product managers, software developers, and test engineers to ensure safety requirements flow consistently and traceably through product and component requirements.
Requirements traceability and verification support:
Maintain bidirectional traceability from safety requirements through design, implementation, and verification.
Collaborate with QA and test teams to define verification strategies, review test cases for safety coverage, and confirm that safety requirements are demonstrably satisfied prior to release.
Documentation and modeling:
Author clear, well-structured safety documentation and contribute to system models (SysML/MBSE) with a safety lens - capturing safety-relevant behavior, failure propagation paths, and mitigations.
Produce artifacts that are defensible to airworthiness authorities and understandable to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Hazard and safety analysis:
Lead and support safety analysis activities including Functional Hazard Assessments (FHA), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Mode and Effects Summary (FMES) for Hivemind software components and autonomy pipelines.
Identify safety-relevant failure conditions, assess severity, and drive mitigation strategies into the system architecture.
Cross-stack safety integration:
Work closely with engineers across the full product stack - including foundational software, autonomy and AI algorithms, simulation and test infrastructure, and GUI layers - to ensure safety requirements are correctly allocated to software components and that the system architecture supports safe operation under both nominal and off-nominal conditions.
Certification Evidence Support:
Collaborate with teams to ensure that process adherence, artifact completeness, and traceability are continuously demonstrated through development artifacts rather than assessed solely through manual reviews.
Support the generation, organization, and validation of certification evidence, ensuring it is accurate, complete, and defensible for internal and external airworthiness assessments

Required qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree with approximately 7+ years of relevant experience, or Master’s degree with approximately 5+ years of relevant experience, in Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, or a closely related technical field with demonstrated experience on safety-critical airborne software.
Experience working within or applying safety-critical standards (e.g., DO-178C, MIL-HDBK-516C, ARP4754A, ARP4761)
Experience deriving safety requirements and allocating them to software components at defined criticality levels.
Experience in software development workflows in modern languages (C++, Python, Go, etc.) and software engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, configuration management, and software lifecycle processes.
Familiarity with requirements management tools such as DOORS, Jama, or Jira, and with maintaining traceability across a safety software lifecycle.
Experience working cross-functionally with software engineers, test engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, mission-critical environment.
Strong organizational, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills; ability to translate safety obligations into actionable engineering guidance

Preferred qualifications:

Familiarity with MBSE practices and system modeling tools (Cameo, SysML) as applied to safety-critical architectures.
Prior experience with military airworthiness authority (USAF, Army, Navy) coordination.
Exposure to autonomy or robotic software systems and the safety challenges unique to non-deterministic or ML-enabled components.
Experience creating software tooling to automate safety data management
Hands-on experience working with CI/CD pipelines, automated test frameworks, and build systems to design and implement development workflows that continuously generate verifiable evidence of system behavior and support certification objectives.

$140,000 - $210,000 a year

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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.

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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