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. Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively supports operations worldwide. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build the backend services that make those workflows reliable. You will connect training runs to their data, code and configuration, manage model artifacts and help machine-learning engineers spend less time reconstructing what happened in an experiment.

Connect exact dataset, code and configuration versions to training runs, checkpoints and model versions.

Develop APIs and adapters that connect training jobs, data services and artifact storage.

Make checkpoints, model artifacts and evaluation results easy to find and retrieve for further training, evaluation or deployment.

Work directly with machine-learning engineers to simplify their workflows and reduce manual record keeping.

Deliver tested services with observability and compatible upgrades across supported cloud and customer-managed environments.

Engineers can trace a model version back to the data, code, configuration and run that produced it.

Experience building production backend services for machine-learning platforms or data-intensive workflows.





Strong software engineering skills in Python or a comparable backend language.

Understanding of training runs, checkpoints and model versioning.

Ability to work directly with machine-learning users and deliver maintainable software that solves their workflow problems.

Experience integrating Kubernetes jobs, object storage or machine-learning workflow systems.

Experience with reproducibility, data provenance or evaluation records.

Experience supporting open-source software or on-premises and air-gapped deployments.

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will help build the reference architecture used internally by our engineering teams and delivered to customers building their own AI capabilities. Your work will directly impact how quickly researchers can iterate, how efficiently compute resources are utilized, and how AI systems move from experimentation to operational deployment.

This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of modern AI, distributed systems, Kubernetes, and defense, building a platform that enables the next generation of autonomy systems while leveraging the best of the open-source AI ecosystem.

$Full-time regular employee offer package:

Temporary employee offer package:

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Backend) (Madrid)
🏢 shieldai
📍 Madrid