Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge Platform, Tools (R5790)
- Salary
- USD 130,000 - 240,000 / per-year-salary
- Level
- Senior
- Work type
- On-site · San Diego
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 22 October 2026.
About the role
Shield AI's standard text
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.
About Shield AI:
Shield AI is a defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. We build autonomy systems for air, maritime, space, and other platforms operating in complex and contested environments.
Forge is the engineering platform used to build, integrate, test, and operate Hivemind capabilities. It connects autonomy developers with the applications, services, compute, data, and workflows they need to move from local development to deployed systems.
Job Description:
We are looking for a full-stack engineer interested in customer-facing products, developer tools, and AI-assisted workflows. You will partner with internal subject-matter experts to build an extensible application platform and complete applications on it.
Shield AI’s Hivemind developers are the platform’s primary design partners and proving ground. Forge is also designed for external engineering teams to adopt, extend, and integrate into their own environments.
You will help evolve Forge into an integrated engineering environment with shared foundations for APIs, user interfaces, extensions, model integrations, and agent tools. Working across frontend architecture, backend services, platform contracts, and deployment, you will validate the platform through real workflows. Your work will help engineers understand complex systems, develop autonomy software, investigate failures, and deliver reliable capabilities faster.
What you'll do:
- Build and operate a full-stack platform embedded in the workflows used to train, validate, and deploy the AI Pilot.
- Design a composable UI architecture that lets applications contribute widgets, dashboards, commands, and shared resource context.
- Define typed, versioned contracts between the platform and independently developed Forge applications.
- Create workflows for teams to package, publish, configure, install, upgrade, and disable applications.
- Enable Forge’s native AI experiences and external agent harnesses to understand active context, invoke authorized tools, navigate applications, and compose dashboards.
- Deliver consistent application behavior across local-development and remote-cluster environments.
- Partner with simulation, autonomy, and ML subject-matter experts to build initial applications, validate the platform against real workflows, and incorporate what you learn.
- Work across infrastructure, security, product, and design to shape the platform’s architecture and engineering practices.
Key outcomes:
A successful engineer in this role will help deliver the following outcomes:
- Applications behave consistently across local-development and remote-cluster environments, even when their deployment and service lifecycles differ.
- Application developers can move quickly using clear contracts, examples, documentation, and authoring guides.
- Hivemind teams can develop, integrate, test, and diagnose autonomy capabilities more quickly using Forge applications and platform services.
- Users can combine applications, tools, and shared context into persistent workflows tailored to their needs and share those workflows within their organization.
- Internal teams and external customers can build integrated Forge applications that extend these workflows without modifying the core platform.
- Forge’s embedded AI and external agent harnesses can explore and operate the same catalog of platform tools through shared contracts.
Required qualifications:
- Experience owning production full-stack applications from design and implementation through rollout and support.
- Strong proficiency with TypeScript and React or an equivalent modern web stack.
- Experience building production backend services in Go, Python, Rust, or a comparable language.
- Experience designing typed, versioned APIs and contracts between independently deployed components.
- Strong knowledge of web and distributed-system architecture, including state management, routing, asynchronous communication, browser security, authentication, authorization, and failure handling.
- Ability to build intuitive technical tools for engineers and test them at the unit, integration, and system levels.
- Sound judgment about when to extend an existing system, introduce an abstraction, or keep a solution intentionally small.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to work across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and product disciplines.
Preferred qualifications:
Experience owning production full-stack applications from design and implementation through rollout and support.
- Strong proficiency with TypeScript and React or an equivalent modern web stack.
- Experience building production backend services in Go, Python, Rust, or a comparable language.
- Experience designing typed, versioned APIs and contracts between independently deployed components.
- Strong knowledge of web and distributed-system architecture, including state management, routing, asynchronous communication, browser security, authentication, authorization, and failure handling.
- Ability to build intuitive technical tools for engineers and test them at the unit, integration, and system levels.
- Sound judgment about when to extend an existing system, introduce an abstraction, or keep a solution intentionally small.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to work across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and product disciplines.
Why join us:
- Connect your work directly to the mission. The platform and applications you build help engineers develop, validate, and deliver the autonomy software behind Hivemind.
- Define human-and-agent workflows. Design how engineers and AI agents use the same platform tools while preserving user control, security, and accountability.
- Own complete workflows. Work across user experience, frontend architecture, backend services, APIs, deployment, and operations.
- Build alongside engaged users. Partner with engineers solving autonomy, simulation, data, and infrastructure problems, and see the direct effect of your decisions.
#LI-DM2
#LC
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.
Shield AI's standard text
###
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.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Golang · Rust
Rare in Shield AI's other 299 open postings.
Standard for full stack roles
Python · React · TypeScript
Common in full stack postings at any company.
87% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Shield AI's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with Shield AI's other open jobs.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 36 open in Engineering. 26 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in July: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (27 of 36), C++ (22 of 36), Linux (14 of 36), CI/CD (8 of 36), Golang (8 of 36), Kubernetes (6 of 36), PyTorch (6 of 36)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Staff Engineer, Modelling and Simulation (R6248) posted Oct 17
- Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245) posted Oct 17
- Manager, Visual Design - Synthetic Reality Development posted Oct 16
- Staff Engineer, Hivemind Reasoning (R6292) posted Oct 15
- Senior Manager, Engineering - Hivemind Reasoning (R6291) posted Oct 15
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy & Motion Planning posted Oct 10
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge (R6244) posted Oct 10
- Senior Principal Engineer, GNC & State Estimation (R6233) posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Full-Stack – Forge (R6232) posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack, Frontend Focus - Forge Applications (R6231) posted Oct 9
- Staff Autonomy Integration Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Autonomy Behaviors posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineering Manager posted Oct 9
- Systems Test Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Software Engineer, Software Integration & Test posted Oct 9
- Staff Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Oct 8
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035) posted Oct 3
- Perception Engineer - Multimodal & Embodied AI (R6022) posted Oct 3
- Senior C++ Engineer – Foundations (R6023) posted Oct 3
- Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159) posted Oct 3
- Senior Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Aircraft Trajectory Modeling (R5787) posted Sep 26
- Staff Deep Learning Engineer, State Estimation (R5785) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, State Estimation (R5783) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019) posted Sep 22
- Autonomy Engineer- Behavior and Motion Planning (R6007) posted Sep 16
- Autonomy & Perception Software Engineer (R5911) posted Sep 9
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted Aug 31
- Staff Engineer, Data Platform (R5659) posted Aug 26
- Discrete Planning Engineer (R5440) posted Jul 24
- Staff Engineer, Core Platform Integration (R5411) posted Jul 23
- Senior Staff Engineer, Software Autonomy (R5125) posted Jun 4
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted May 14
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Sep 30
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Jul 8
From the team and dates on Shield AI's own job board.
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