Principal Product Designer (R3167)

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent, autonomous systems. Its products include Hivemind Enterprise-EdgeOS, Pilot, Commander, and Forge-as well as V-BAT and Sentient Vision Systems (wide-area motion imaging software). With offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Abu Dhabi (UAE), Kyiv (Ukraine), and Melbourne (Australia), Shield AI's technology actively supports U.S. and allied operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X and Instagram.

Our objective is to accelerate autonomy development, test and evaluation with the Hivemind SDK using generative AI capabilities. The product designer within the special teams will drive the vision and experience of how Generative AI capabilities are integrated into the Hivemind Enterprise product ecosystem.

As a developer facing software product, Hivemind Enterprise is a highly technical product whose users are autonomy engineers and test engineers. The experiences of generative AI capabilities are therefore within the environments that software engineers and testers use daily: the terminal, the IDE, repositories, build systems, continuous integration and deployment and issue tracking.

We seek highly technical designers that are part-designer, part-coders who flourish at the intersection of design and software engineering. We are interested in candidates that are very tuned-in to the latest developments in AI and agentic systems, with experience and opinions about the how generative AI systems are influencing and evolving the discipline of software engineering.

What You'll Do:

• Design and prototype generative AI experience focused on accelerating autonomy development
• Work closely with members of the Office of the CTO to crystallize the vision of the Hivemind product and its documentation
• Lead the user experience design of Hivemind Generative AI
• Work closely with the technical leads of Hivemind Commander (mission planning, command and control, air-ground communications) and Hivemind Design (configurations, test and evaluation, rehearsal, analysis) to enhance the user experience of their products
• Conduct user research to understand user personae and their needs
• Investigate competing products and their user experiences, synthesize findings to present to engineering and product leadership

Required Qualifications:

• Masters degree or equivalent in design, interaction design, human-computer-interaction, or similar
• 8+ years of experience as a product and/or user experience designer
• Deep experience with all aspects of software engineering from the terminal and IDE, to CI/CD, build-systems, bug tracking, static and dynamic code analysis
• Deep experience an opinions about the roles and user experiences of RAGs, MCP, tool-calling, AI-first IDEs (e.g. Cursor, Windsuf, …), AI-first terminals (e.g. Warp, …), AI-first protoyping tools (e.g. bolt.new, v0.dev, …)
• Enough-to-be-dangerous software engineering skills, particularly for front-end development within a React/Typescript environment
• Comfortable working within a Linux environment, experience with the Linux terminal
• Thrives in a high-velocity product development environment
• Is comfortable with ambiguity and is able to produce results with high-level guidance

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with user experience design of autonomous systems
• Experience with user experience design video games
• Experience designing for "Low Code" or "No Code" systems
• Experience and/or comfort reading C++ and/or Python and/or Typescript

$215,176 - $322,764 a year

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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.