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, visitwww.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI onLinkedIn,X,Instagram, andYouTube.

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, visitwww.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI onLinkedIn,X,Instagram, andYouTube.
The Hivemind Software Engineering Integration and Test team is seeking a Staff Automated Test Engineer to provide technical leadership for automated verification across our next-generation autonomy platform. You will define and evolve test architecture, validation infrastructure, MLOps quality systems, and CI/CD pipelines that enable the Hivemind software ecosystem to create, test, and deploy resilient autonomy capabilities for unmanned aircraft and robotic platforms operating in complex, contested, and GPS-denied environments.
You will work across production flight code, machine learning models, simulation and synthetic environments, mission planning and orchestration systems, operator-facing Ground Control Station applications, telemetry and data pipelines,



cloud-native developer infrastructure, and hardware-in-the-loop systems.
In this hands-on Staff role, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, establish automation and verification standards, identify systemic quality risks, and develop scalable test infrastructure. The idóneo candidate combines deep Python automation and distributed-systems testing experience with technical leadership and experience validating machine learning systems throughout the data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
What you'll do:

Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for automated testing, verification, and MLOps quality across the Hivemind ecosystem.
Design and maintain scalable test frameworks for autonomy software, backend services, APIs, operator-facing applications, and distributed hardware environments.
Lead functional, integration, regression, system, performance, reliability, and end-to-end testing across simulation, edge-compute, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
Build automated ML validation pipelines covering data quality, training reproducibility, model accuracy, robustness, regression, latency, resource utilization, and system integration.
Establish CI/CD and continuous training workflows that provide versioning and traceability for datasets, models, configurations, evaluation results,



and deployment artifacts.
Develop scenario-based validation for autonomy models, including edge cases, degraded sensing or communications, distribution shifts, and representative mission conditions.
Create observability, analytics, and failure-triage capabilities for software behavior, model and data drift, inference health, test results, and production performance.
Build Python automation that improves test execution, parallelization, reporting, environment setup, experiment comparison, and developer productivity.
Create test harnesses, simulators, stubs, mocks, and synthetic data capabilities that improve system testability and coverage.
Collaborate with software, autonomy, machine learning, data, simulation, and systems engineers to define verification strategies and improve designs before implementation.
Develop and govern AI-assisted engineering workflows using coding agents and LLM-based tools for test generation, log analysis, debugging, and failure triage while maintaining security, reproducibility, and traceability.
Required qualifications:

Typically 8+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer tooling, MLOps, systems integration, or systems verification, or an equivalent combination of experience and demonstrated impact.
5+ years of experience building scalable automation frameworks or developer tooling in Python.
Demonstrated success designing test, CI/CD, or MLOps infrastructure used across multiple engineering teams.
Experience validating machine learning systems across the data, training, evaluation, packaging, deployment, and monitoring lifecycle.
Understanding of ML quality risks such as data leakage, training-

📌 Staff Engineer, Test Automation (Madrid)
🏢 shieldai
📍 Madrid