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
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Enterprise Software Engineering team, you will design and build the applications, services, and integrations that keep Shield AI's business running – connecting the systems our engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and finance teams depend on every day. You will work primarily in C#/.NET with React on the frontend, building distributed, message-driven systems in the cloud and bringing AI capabilities into the tools our people use.
This is a hands-on, senior engineering role, where you will drive solutions from requirements, system design through deployment and support – sometimes leading a project, and at other times working closely with your teammates on a shared codebase. We move fast, so we are looking for someone who learns quickly, hits the ground running, and is comfortable making sound decisions with incomplete information.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and maintain enterprise applications, APIs, and services using C#/.NET and React, with Python where it is the right tool for the job.
- Architect and implement distributed, event-driven systems using message brokers (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, Azure Service Bus, MQTT) and service frameworks such as NServiceBus or MassTransit.
- Build reliable integrations between enterprise systems (e.g., PLM, ERP, identity, and engineering platforms), handling long-running workflows, retries, and failure recovery.
- Apply proven system design patterns – such as Saga/process managers, outbox, CQRS, and idempotent consumers – to deliver scalable, resilient, maintainable solutions.
- Design and integrate AI capabilities into applications, such as LLM-powered features, agents, and intelligent automation.
- Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, and review.
- Deploy and operate services in Azure and/or AWS for our team and other teams across the business, applying sound practices for security, networking, identity, reliability, and cost.
- Use existing CI/CD and developer platforms (GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Artifactory, SonarQube) to build, test, and ship software; contribute pipeline changes as your projects require.
- Instrument services for observability and troubleshoot asynchronous and distributed processes in production.
- Collaborate closely with fellow Staff engineers – contributing to design reviews, code reviews, and the team's engineering standards – and lead projects when the work calls for it.
- Partner with stakeholders across the business to understand problems, shape requirements, and deliver solutions with measurable impact.
Required qualifications
- Typically requires a minimum of 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field; or equivalent practical experience.
- Deep expertise in C# and .NET (.NET 6+ / ASP.NET Core, an open-source web development framework | .NET Core), including building RESTful APIs, background services, and Entity Framework or similar data access.
- Professional experience building frontends with React (TypeScript preferred).
- Hands-on experience with messaging and event-driven architecture using RabbitMQ, Kafka, MQTT, Azure Service Bus, or similar technologies, including an understanding of delivery guarantees, ordering, retries, and dead-letter handling.
- Strong knowledge/experience in architecting and using Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) tools
- Strong understanding of system design and architectural patterns, including distributed systems, microservices vs. modular monoliths, eventual consistency, and resiliency patterns.
- Cloud experience is a must – preferably Azure or AWS. Solid grasp of core cloud concepts at an associate-certification level (e.g., AZ-204, AZ-104, AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, AWS Developer – Associate), including security, networking, identity and access management (IAM/RBAC), compute, storage, and managed services.
- Working knowledge of CI/CD and deployment practices – comfortable building, deploying, and troubleshooting applications through pipelines, though platform administration is not a primary responsibility.
- Experience with relational databases (e.g., SQL Server, PostgreSQL), including data modeling and query performance.
- Strong experience with AI coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) and practical judgment about how to use them effectively and safely.
- Strong testing discipline, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Thrives in a fast-paced environment – learns new domains and technologies quickly and delivers value early.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated commitment to ownership, continuous improvement, and being a reliable, respectful team member.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience implementing the Saga pattern (orchestration and/or choreography) for long-running business processes.
- Experience with NServiceBus and the Particular Service Platform (ServicePulse, ServiceInsight, ServiceControl), or comparable tools for monitoring and troubleshooting asynchronous, message-based systems.
- Proficiency in Python for services, scripting, data processing, or AI/ML workloads.
- Active Azure or AWS certification (ass
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