Staff Engineer, HMS DevOps/DevEx

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Shield AI

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.

🎯 The Role

As an engineer on the HMS DevOps/DevEx Team, you will write the automation, configure the environments, and build the CI/CD pipelines that power the software development lifecycle across Hivemind Solutions. Your work is hands-on and focused on engineering maximum velocity, reproducibility, and security into our distributed developer tooling and cloud testing environments.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Write, configure, and maintain robust GitLab CI/CD pipelines and runner environments for C++, Python, and Node.js software projects, ensuring fast compilation and test execution.
• Build, test, and deploy automated tooling integrations, webhook dispatchers, and state-change scripts connecting GitLab, Jira, and Confluence to orchestrate release workflows.
• Write custom Python or Bash extensions for our pi-gov harness, configuring secure, audited LLM routing rules and local container configurations.
• Deploy, scale, and configure the Forge simulation and test orchestrator in Azure Gov Cloud, optimizing runner autoscaling and cloud compute consumption.
• Maintain, configure, and secure Artifactory package registries, implementing secure container builds via BuildKit, secret injection, and Entra ID integration.
• Partner with development teams to migrate legacy project build systems to reproducible Nix developer environments, writing default Nix derivations and flake configurations.
• Troubleshoot pipeline failures, broken builds, registry access issues, and system-level configuration drift across development environments.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Typically requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Practical experience building, maintaining, and scaling enterprise CI/CD systems, with deep expertise in GitLab CI/CD pipelines and runner infrastructure.
• Direct experience writing scripts (Bash, Python) and utilizing webhooks/APIs to automate and integrate engineering tools (such as Jira, Confluence, and GitLab).
• Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker, multi-stage builds) and package managers (such as Conan, Poetry, or Nix).
• Familiarity with deploying and managing application workloads in cloud environments (such as Azure Gov Cloud or AWS).
• Experience with secure software development practices, secret management, and identity providers (Active Directory, Entra ID).
• Solid Linux system administration, networking, and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET security clearance (U.S. citizenship required).

🎁 Benefits

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)

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Ability to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET security clearance (U.S. citizenship required).