Staff Engineer, Data Platform (R5659)

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:

We are looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to help define and build the data foundation of the AI Factory.

The Data Platform provides a unifying, knowledge-graph-centered API layer for human and agentic workflows. It connects configurations, requirements, software versions, test executions, files, signals, training data, and results through stable identities and typed relationships. It also provides consistent access to the storage and compute systems behind those data products.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will design platform architecture, implement production software, evaluate storage and compute technologies, establish data-modeling patterns, and work directly with teams collecting and consuming mission-critical data. Success requires balancing developer productivity, semantic clarity, operational reliability, system performance, portability, and long-term maintainability.

What you'll do:

• Develop a unifying Graph API: Lead the architecture and implementation of the knowledge graph and multi-modal API layer that serves as the backbone for human, service, and agentic workflows.
• Own DataOps infrastructure: Research, optimize, and maintain the storage, indexing, query, ingestion, and compute infrastructure used throughout the data lifecycle.
• Establish best-practices: Establish durable, best-practice patterns for schema modeling, relationships, lineage, and schema evolution.
• Turbocharge agentic data access: Build APIs that enable agents to retrieve structured, connected, and explainable context rather than relying only on keyword or vector similarity.
• Develop reference architectures: Establish recommended storage and compute profiles, deployment patterns, benchmarks, and operational guidance for both internal and customer-managed infrastructure.
• Advise downstream teams: Partner directly with autonomy, ML, test, infrastructure, product, and customer-facing teams to turn real workflows into reusable platform capabilities from modeling to integrations.
• Build first-party integrations: Deliver integrations that make important data easy to collect and aggregate, including data produced by simulations, test infrastructure, training systems, and edge devices.
• Improve developer experience: Create self-service APIs, SDKs, tools, examples, and diagnostics that make correct data modeling and ingestion the easiest path.
• Drive technical direction: Evaluate emerging data and AI infrastructure technologies, make principled build-versus-buy decisions, and guide implementation across team boundaries.
• Raise operational quality: Establish expectations for observability, performance, reliability, security, data integrity, disaster recovery, and lifecycle management.

Key outcomes:

• Human and agentic workflows use one coherent API for discovering data, traversing relationships, and accessing specialized payloads.
• Teams spend their time deciding how to model and use data rather than repeatedly deciding where and how to store it.
• Data produced at the edge, in simulation, during testing, and in training flows into reusable platform models with minimal integration friction.
• Portable and operational platform capabilities across all deployment environments.
• Downstream teams can adopt the platform through stable APIs and SDKs instead of custom point-to-point integrations.

Required qualifications:

• Significant experience designing and operating distributed data solutions, storage systems, or data-intensive backend services.
• Strong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in languages such as Go and Python.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, API design, schema evolution, identity, consistency, indexing, query planning, and data lifecycle concerns.
• Experience working across multiple storage modalities, such as relational or graph databases, object storage, analytical or columnar systems, and file storage.
• Experience designing reliable ingestion and access paths for high-volume or operationally important data.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, Linux, networking, security, storage, observability, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
• Experience deploying data infrastructure across cloud or customer-managed environments using modern Infrastructure as Code and platform engineering practices.
• Ability to evaluate technologies through prototypes, benchmarks, operational requirements, and total lifecycle cost rather than feature lists alone.
• Experience defining architecture and technical standards while remaining hands-on in implementation and debugging.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, test teams, platform engineers, and product stakeholders.
• Clear technical communication and the ability to make complex data architecture understandable to both specialists and downstream users.

Bonus qualifications and relevant technologies:

Experience in any of the following is beneficial but not required:

• Experience with specialized modern databases (eg graph, OLAP, etc...)
• Graph-backed retrieval, agent tooling, structured RAG, provenance-aware context construction, or explainable retrieval systems.
• S3-compatible APIs, cloud object storage, content-addressable storage, multipart transfer, or large-file lifecycle management.
• Apache Arrow, Parquet, columnar formats, time-series data, or high-performance analytical query systems.
• OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, WebSockets, generated SDKs, and long-lived public API contracts.
• Kubernetes storage and data operators, Terraform, Helm, GitOps, and repeatable platform distribution.
• Distributed execution technologies such as Ray and experience connecting workflow execution to data lineage and artifact management.
• Streaming and ingestion technologies such as Kafka, NATS, Redpanda, or comparable event-driven systems.
• Data and analysis in a robotics or AI domain.
• ML data lifecycle systems, experiment tracking, dataset management, evaluation infrastructure, feature or artifact stores, and model versioning.
• Observability tools, distributed tracing, and benchmarking.
• Data security, authorization, governance, retention, classification, and auditability across shared platforms.

Why join us:

The Data Platform is foundational to how Shield AI builds, evaluates, certifies, and improves autonomy. This role offers the opportunity to shape both a core internal platform and a reference architecture delivered into demanding customer environments.

Your work will determine how effectively engineers and agents can find trusted context, understand provenance, aggregate data from distributed systems, and turn operational experience into better intelligent systems. You will work at the intersection of data systems, AI infrastructure, autonomy, distributed computing, and defense while helping establish the architecture that supports the next generation of mission-critical AI development.

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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.