Staff Engineer, GenAI Tooling & DevEx (R5469)

Shield AI is hiring a Staff Engineer, GenAI Tooling & DevEx (R5469) in Washington DC, United States. It pays $150k-$220k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Shield AI.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Shield AI has 657 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

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:

As a GenAI Tooling & Developer Experience Engineer on the HMS DevOps Team, you will design, develop, and maintain the GenAI tooling that accelerates the development velocity of your fellow software engineers. You will collaborate with robotics and autonomy software engineers to understand their workflows, remove friction, and enable effective GenAI-assisted development in both commercial and government environments while meeting requirements for secure, controlled data.

You will build the automation, infrastructure, and integration layers that make GenAI useful across the software engineering organization. You will streamline processes across GitLab, Jira, and Confluence so colleagues spend less time coordinating work and more time creating software. You will apply your expertise in C++, Python, build systems, and developer tooling to provide more power and context to our developers and GenAI tools.

This is a high-leverage role where your impact scales through the work of others: every improvement you make to GenAI tooling, automation, and developer workflows will help engineers across HMS move faster, work more securely, and spend more time solving the hardest robotics and autonomy problems.

What you'll do:

Design, develop, and maintain GenAI-enabled developer tools for C++, Python, and Node.js software projects.
Partner with robotics and autonomy engineers to identify high-friction workflows and convert them into secure, repeatable GenAI-assisted tooling.
Extend our custom GenAI harness with Python or Bash tools, secure LLM routing, audited execution paths, and local containerized environments.
Build integrations across GitLab, Jira, Confluence, and internal developer systems to provide GenAI tools with useful engineering context.
Improve build, test, and developer-environment workflows, including GenAI-assisted adoption of reproducible Nix development environments.
Support engineers adopting GenAI tooling through documentation, examples, troubleshooting, and feedback-driven improvements.

Required qualifications:

Typically requires a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Fluent with GenAI-assisted development. You can pair with AI tools to explore ideas, generate code, debug issues, and quickly turn rough concepts into working prototypes.
Hands-on experience building LLM-powered tools for software development.
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).
Ability to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET security clearance (U.S. citizenship required).

Preferred qualifications:

Practical experience building, maintaining, and scaling enterprise CI/CD systems.
Experience developing tools in CUI and ITAR environments.
Expertise in tuning LLMs for specialized use
Familiarity with deploying custom LLMs

#LI-LD1 #LD
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. ### 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.

How we rate this

Staff Engineer, GenAI Tooling & DevEx (R5469) at Shield AI rates 9 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.