Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment - open level (R5497)
Shield AI · San Diego, California; Washington, D.C.; Remote
Extracted from the posting
Field engineer deploying, supporting, and sustaining Hivemind products in customer operating environments, covering installation, configuration, validation, training, and troubleshooting. Work includes runbooks, evidence capture, known-issue records, and routing issues to engineering. Requires C++, Python or Bash scripting, and Linux or embedded troubleshooting experience.
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
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Job Description:
Shield AI builds intelligent systems that protect service members and civilians. Our products include Hivemind autonomy software and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and our teams support customers and operations across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
The Forward Deployed Engineer, Operations & Sustainment is a highly technical, customer-facing role focused on deploying, supporting, and sustaining Hivemind products in real operating environments. This role bridges field deployment, customer operations, technical troubleshooting, training, and sustainment.
This is a travel-intensive role. Candidates must be willing and able to travel at least 50% of the time, including frequent domestic and international trips, customer-site work, test events, training events, and multi-week deployments as program needs require.
In this role, you will work directly with customers and internal teams to install, configure, validate, train, troubleshoot, and support Hivemind products. The role requires strong technical judgment, clear customer communication, comfort operating under field pressure, and the discipline to turn field lessons into durable support artifacts: runbooks, supported baselines, evidence packages, known-issue records, escalation paths, customer-safe updates, and product feedback.
What you'll do:
Projects you might work on:
Required qualifications:
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with autonomy, robotics, defense aviation, unmanned aircraft, deployed defense systems, flight test, payload integration, sensors, operator systems, or edge compute environments.
- Experience supporting defense, government, allied, or international customers in operational, test, training, or overseas environments.
- Experience building or scaling a support, field-service, customer-success, sustainment, or applications-engineering function during an early product rollout.
- Experience with enterprise software deployment, customer support, licensing, provisioning, release management, configuration baselines, or offline/air-gapped operating environments.
- Hands-on experience with recorded-data analysis, diagnostic tooling, telemetry review, networking tools, system health checks, or support automation.
- FAA Part 107, military aviation or maintenance background, UAS operator experience, flight-test experience, systems engineering experience, or prior Field Service Representative experience.
- Experience using GenAI tools to accelerate troubleshooting, documentation, knowledge capture, data review, or support workflow automation.
- Active or prior security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one when required by program or customer need.
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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.
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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.
Compensation: USD 156,000 – 320,000 per year salary
