Chief Engineer, Autonomy — Space Domain
at Shieldai
Washington, D.C.; Dallas, Texas; San Diego, California, executive, full time, 12+ years
posted 22 Jun 2026
- Decision-making
- Satellite ground systems
- Ground compute
- Constellation operations
- SAR
- Space mission planning
- Spacecraft operations
- Sensor fusion
- Autonomous planning
- Architecture design
- Distributed coordination
- Optimization
- Remote sensing
- On-board data processing
- Multi-agent coordination
- Hybrid compute architectures
- Embedded compute
- Cloud compute
- Systems engineering
- Hosted-payload architectures
- Hardware-in-the-loop
- Requirements engineering
- EO/IR
- Trade studies
- Payload operations
- CONOPS
- Navigation
- Edge compute
- APIs
- Verification planning
- Communications
- Cybersecurity engineering
- ISR
- Scheduling
- ICDs
- Software-in-the-loop
- Multi-orbit tasking
- RF
- Payload control
- Resource management
- Data-product generation
- Risk management
- Communication-aware autonomy
About the role
Posted: 2026-06-22
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.
Shield AI builds trusted autonomy for national-security space missions. The Chief Engineer, Autonomy — Space Domain is the senior technical authority responsible for defining, delivering, and sustaining autonomy capabilities that convert distributed space, ground, and payload resources into timely, decision-quality data products. This leader owns the technical vision, system architecture, execution rigor, risk posture, verification strategy, and operational readiness of the space-autonomy solution across its lifecycle: concept development, integration, test, launch/commissioning support where applicable, on-orbit operations, software updates, and mission evolution. The role ensures that autonomy performs reliably across multi-constellation and multi-orbit mission environments, supports resilient operation in constrained or contested conditions, and delivers usable information to mission users at operational tempo. This is not a research position. This is a position focused on delivering mission-ready autonomy systems that perform in real-world operational environments.
What you would do
Serve as the senior technical authority for space-domain autonomy, accountable for mission architecture, software/system design, technical execution, product quality, technical risk, verification evidence, and customer technical confidence.
Define and evolve an autonomy architecture that supports end-to-end tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination across a heterogeneous space enterprise, including satellites, hosted payloads, ground systems, mission applications, communications networks, cloud/edge compute, and external data sources.
Lead the development of automatic and autonomous behaviors for multi-constellation and/or multi-orbit tasking, including prioritization, scheduling, replanning, resource allocation, coordination, conflict resolution, and response to dynamic mission demands.
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