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.

Job Description

Shield AI is building autonomous aircraft that redefine aviation. The Foundation Engineering team builds the pipelines, tools, and systems that make fast, reliable delivery of complex aircraft software possible.

As a DevOps Build Engineer, you will extend our build and delivery infrastructure for our autonomous aircraft (XBAT/VBAT) into classified environments. You will stand up and maintain physical build infrastructure and support software deployments across multiple classification levels. You will also apply DevOps best practices to improve Developer Experience (DevEx) and speed up our software engineers' development cycles.

What you'll do

Extend and mirror build and CI/CD capabilities into classified and air-gapped environments, keeping them aligned with unclassified development workflows.

Design, stand up, and maintain on-premises physical build infrastructure (servers, storage, networking, and build clusters), including hardware selection, rack/install, provisioning, and lifecycle management.

Architect and support multi-classification deployments, including controlled transfer of source, dependencies, artifacts, and containers across network boundaries.

Work with Security, IT, and ISSM/ISSO teams to make sure build systems meet accreditation and compliance requirements (e.g., RMF, DISA STIGs, NIST 800-53/800-171).

Be an expert on our software build and delivery process, from developer workstations to CI to deployment.

Improve developer velocity by reducing build/test cycle time and removing pipeline bottlenecks.

Work with Software Engineers to understand their requirements, propose designs, and implement solutions.

Partner with developers to resolve build/test failures quickly and set best practices for integration.

Integrate CI pipelines with HIL and simulation environments for automated validation.

Implement monitoring, dashboards, and alerts for build system performance across local development, CI, and classified environments.

Use agentic solutions to quickly identify the root cause of build failures and route the right feedback to the responsible Software Engineer.

Required qualifications

BS in CS, CE, EE, or related field with 7+ years of industry experience (or MS/PhD with 5+ years).

Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret clearance.

Hands-on experience provisioning and administering physical servers and on-prem infrastructure.

Understanding of and hands-on experience using AI tools (e.g., LLMs, coding assistants, agentic workflows) to improve engineering productivity and automate workflows.

Strong understanding of dependency management, artifact repositories (e.g., Artifactory, Nexus), and package managers (e.g., Conan, CPM, pip).

Proficiency with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, cloud build clusters).

Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash).

Hands-on experience integrating automated testing into CI pipelines.

Demonstrated success improving developer productivity at scale.

Demonstrated track record of excellence as a primary contributor on projects, with the ability to work through development cycles, overcome obstacles, and deliver high-quality solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Proficiency with CI/CD tools (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab).

Cloud operations experience (Azure, AWS, GCP), including government cloud regions (e.g., Azure Government, AWS GovCloud).

Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) and monitoring (Grafana, Prometheus).

Background in robotics, autonomy, or aerospace systems.