Senior Manager, GNC (R5627)

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. 

As manager of the Guidance and Control team, you will be responsible for leading and maintaining all of control and autonomy algorithms within the VBAT code base.  Team responsibilities are full lifecycle development to include algorithm development, software design and coding, unit tests, component tests, flight software qualification and flight test support. During this lifecycle, the Guidance and Control team must negotiate workshare and integrate solutions tightly with the Hivemind team, the State Estimation team, the Simulation Development team, the Aerodynamics team and the Embedded Software team. 

Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 7 years with a Master’s degree; or 5 years with a PhD. 

Proven track record of successfully shipping products, showcasing the ability to navigate through development cycles, overcome obstacles, and deliver high-quality solutions to meet project deadlines and exceed expectations in a fast-paced environment. 

Experience growing team members a creating / maintaining a high-performance team 

Tasking with specific intent on Individual career growth plans and execution 

Mentoring team members on career growth 

Ability to identify weaknesses on the team and either train or hire to fill any capability gaps 

Ability to effectively negotiate work responsibility and alignment between various teams in a cross functional development environment. 

Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with a focus on delivering user-centric software solutions. 

Experience working with control systems, specifically unmanned aerial systems and/or robotics to include 

Outer loop path planning / trajectory synthesis 

Integrating software in a hierarchical environment 

Familiarity with continuous integration / delivery and test-driven development 

Software Autonomy stack architecture and development 

Hierarchical design to decouple code responsibility to create a robust, maintainable code base 

Outer loop guidance algorithms for trajectory optimization 

Controls knowledge with experience in 

Linear system analysis to include Gain/Phase margin analysis 

Pole placement / LQR algorithms 

Filter development and verification / validation 

Discrete filters 

Kalman filters 

C++ and Python coding experience