Senior Staff Engineer, State Estimation (R4453)

Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. The Senior Staff Engineer will play a critical role in designing, developing, integrating, testing, and deploying navigation and state estimation algorithms for autonomous flight systems.

Responsibilities:

• Research and develop state-of-the-art state estimation and navigation algorithms to enable resilient autonomy in challenging GPS-denied environments
• Design and deploy production-grade C++ software for embedded robotic systems operating in dynamic, real-world environments
• Build and maintain rigorous unit, integration, and system-level tests to ensure system robustness and safety
• Develop and enhance modeling, calibration, and simulation tools for inertial and vision-based navigation systems
• Contribute to roadmap planning, feature decomposition, and agile execution alongside a multidisciplinary team of autonomy engineers
• Continuously enhance performance analysis, benchmarking, and validation pipelines to drive rapid innovation and improvement

Requirements:

• M.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science or a related field; Minimum 2+ years of related professional work experience if you have an M.S degree or 0 years if you have a new Ph.D graduate
• Professional proficiency in modern C++ (C++11 or newer) and strong object-oriented design skills
• Hands-on experience deploying low-latency C++ applications to embedded Linux platforms
• Professional experience designing and implementing state estimation algorithms (e.g., EKF, UKF, Graph-based optimization)
• Familiarity with VIO, SLAM, or multi-sensor fusion frameworks (e.g., gtsam, Ceres, OpenVINS)
• Strong working knowledge of CI pipelines and automated testing frameworks for C++
• Ability to independently deploy high-reliability code suitable for real-world autonomous systems
• Familiarity with prototyping in Python or MATLAB is welcome, but this role demands professional C++ production deployment skills. Candidates whose primary experience is in MATLAB or Python are unlikely to find this position a good fit
• Deep understanding of graph-based optimization for state estimation
• Experience developing vision-aided inertial navigation systems (VINS, VIO)
• Experience with navigation sensor calibration (IMU, GPS, barometers, magnetometers, laser altimeters)
• Experience in benchmarking and system validation for real-world navigation performance