Principal Engineer, Platform (R4748)

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the 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 seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to help architect and advance the internal technology platforms that power our engineering, autonomy development, and enterprise operations environments.

In this highly technical individual contributor role, you will serve as a senior technical authority responsible for designing and evolving scalable, secure, and highly automated platform infrastructure spanning cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. You will work closely with engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to establish platform architecture, define paved paths for developers, and implement automation that improves reliability, security, and development velocity across the organization.

This role is ideal for an experienced platform engineer who thrives at the intersection of systems architecture, automation, and developer enablement, and who enjoys building the foundational systems that allow engineering organizations to move quickly and safely.

This position may be based in San Diego, CA; Dallas, TX; Washington, D.C.; or other Shield AI locations.

What you'll do::
Platform Architecture & Engineering:

• Architect and build scalable internal platform infrastructure supporting engineering workloads across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments.

• Design and implement platform capabilities that enable standardized, secure, and repeatable deployment of applications and services.

• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code frameworks and reusable platform modules to accelerate engineering productivity.

• Establish and evolve “paved path” platform patterns that simplify secure software delivery for engineering teams.

Automation & Developer Enablement:

• Build automation and tooling that improves development lifecycle efficiency across build, test, release, and deployment processes.

• Contribute to and improve CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, and developer platform tooling.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to reduce operational friction and improve system observability, resilience, and reliability.

• Develop internal tools, integrations, and automation frameworks that streamline engineering workflows across the organization.

Infrastructure & Systems Engineering:

• Design and operate highly available infrastructure platforms supporting mission-critical engineering systems.

• Implement scalable solutions across cloud and on-prem environments including compute, networking, identity, and storage.

• Partner with security teams to embed strong security controls, auditability, and compliance requirements into platform architectures.

• Evaluate and introduce new technologies that improve system scalability, security, and operational efficiency.

Technical Leadership:

• Provide senior-level technical guidance across infrastructure, platform engineering, and DevOps initiatives.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering and infrastructure leadership on platform architecture decisions.

• Mentor engineers and promote best practices in automation, reliability engineering, and platform design.

• Drive platform modernization initiatives that improve the scalability and reliability of Shield AI’s internal systems.

Required qualifications::
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering roles supporting large-scale systems.

• Deep hands-on experience designing and operating cloud or hybrid infrastructure platforms, including networking, identity, compute, and storage systems.

• Strong expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Bicep, Ansible, or similar).

• Experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines, developer platform tooling, and automated deployment workflows.

• Strong systems engineering background across Linux-based environments, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation using scripting or programming languages (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, etc.).

• Demonstrated ability to lead complex platform initiatives and influence technical direction across engineering and infrastructure teams.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to operate independently in complex, fast-moving technical environments.

Preferred qualifications::
• Experience building or operating internal developer platforms (IDP) or engineering productivity platforms that support large-scale development environments.

• Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and modern container platforms.

• Experience deploying infrastructure across commercial and government cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Azure) with an understanding of security and compliance constraints in regulated environments.

• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices and integrating security controls into automated infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience implementing observability platforms, including centralized logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing for large-scale systems.

• Experience working within defense, aerospace, or other regulated industries, including familiarity with frameworks such as NIST or FedRAMP.

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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.

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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.