Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941)
Shield AI · On-site
MeritLog read this listing from Shield AI's Lever job board and last checked it on September 9, 2026.
Source: the employer's Lever job board. Open the original listing for current details.
Job details
- Work model
- On-site
- Salary
- $233,000 - $350,000
- Location
- San Diego, California
Hiring context
How this role compares at Shield AI
Shield AI has 461 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 12 job families, and 24 of them are in data & analytics. 363 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 79%.
This role's posted range of $233,000 - $350,000 sits above 94% of the 342 other Shield AI roles quoted over the same currency and period.
Shield AI concentrates this hiring in:
Counted across the job boards MeritLog tracks, at the time this page was served. Pay comparisons use only listings that publish a complete range in the same currency and period.
Job description
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: Shield AI builds autonomy systems for defense applications, including air, maritime, and space platforms operating in complex and contested environments. We are building the AI Factory Reference Architecture, a Kubernetes-native platform for developing, training, evaluating, and deploying next-generation AI systems. The AI Factory serves two purposes. Internally, it powers autonomy development across Hivemind and other AI programs. Externally, it becomes the reference architecture deployed into customer environments, spanning commercial cloud, on-premise infrastructure, sovereign deployments, and fully air-gapped systems. We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to help define and build this platform. You will partner closely with ML researchers, platform engineers, and autonomy teams to deliver an exceptional developer experience for training and deploying modern AI models. Success in this role requires balancing researcher productivity, platform simplicity, operational excellence, and long-term maintainability. You will work hands-on across the stack, helping shape both the platform architecture and its implementation while staying closely aligned with the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.
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