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Staff Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability (R5720)

Shield AI

Engineering - Software

Location: Melbourne, VIC
Type: Full-time

About the 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:

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Tooling & Observability to build the tools that help engineers develop, understand, and diagnose complex software systems.

You will work close to the systems our engineers are building, developing tooling that makes those systems easier to understand and work with. This includes C++ and Python applications, developer-facing observability, web services, React-based user interfaces, visualisations, and engineering workflows.

A major focus of the role is developer-facing observability. Bringing together logs, telemetry, events, faults, and system state so engineers can quickly move from "something went wrong" to "I understand what happened and where to investigate."

You will be comfortable working within complex C++ software systems and understanding how they behave, while looking for opportunities to turn that understanding into better tools for other engineers. This could mean understanding how a component exposes diagnostic information, building services that aggregate it, or designing how that information should be presented to an engineer investigating a problem.

The role sits at the intersection of systems software, developer experience, observability, and engineering tooling. We treat internal tooling as a product. Usability, reliability, maintainability, performance, and the experience of the engineers using it all matter.

Our scope is focused on internal tooling products, Developer Experience, engineering-facing web services, UI/UX for system tooling, and licensing services. This is not a general DevOps or CI/CD engineering role. CI/CD platforms, build and release automation, pipeline infrastructure, build performance, and test execution pipelines sit outside the team's scope.

What you'll do:

As a contributor to the Australian Engineering group, you will be responsible for:

Design, build, and maintain engineering tools that help developers understand and diagnose complex software systems.
Build tooling that brings together logs, telemetry, events, faults, diagnostics, and system state to make system behaviour easier to investigate.
Build C++ and Python applications, libraries, services, and integrations that interact with complex onboard and distributed software systems.
Create tools that correlate information across software components, processes, and machines to help engineers understand what happened and where to investigate.
Build user interfaces and interactive visualisations using React and modern web technologies to explore system behaviour and engineering data.
Design effective workflows for debugging, fault investigation, system introspection, and engineering analysis.
Develop APIs and web services that support engineering tooling products and expose system data in useful ways.
Improve the Developer Experience (DX) of working with complex systems by identifying engineering friction and turning it into effective tooling.
Work directly with software, autonomy, systems, and test engineers to identify high-value problems and develop practical solutions.
Treat internal tooling as a product, incorporating feedback from engineers and continuously improving usability and effectiveness.
Establish reusable UI components, UX patterns, libraries, and engineering standards for system tooling.
Contribute to the architecture and technical direction of the Engineering Tooling capability.

Required qualifications:

Strong software engineering experience with modern C++, ideally C++17/20 or later.
Strong Python development experience.
Experience debugging and reasoning about complex, concurrent, distributed, or component-based software systems.
Experience designing and maintaining production-quality software, libraries, services, APIs, or applications.
Strong understanding of software architecture and the ability to navigate and reason about large codebases.
Experience building tools for software engineers or other technical users.
Experience working with logs, telemetry, metrics, events, traces, faults, or other diagnostic data.
Ability to reason about behaviour across multiple software components and correlate information from different sources.
Strong Linux development and debugging skills.
Experience designing APIs, services, and software interfaces.
Ability to independently identify engineering problems worth solving and turn ambiguous needs into practical, reliable tooling.
Ability to make sound architectural decisions and collaborate effectively across engineering teams.
Strong software engineering practices, including testing, code review, maintainability, documentation, and performance awareness.
A product mindset toward internal engineering tools, with attention to usability and developer experience.

Nice to Have

Experience with React, TypeScript, and modern web application development.
Experience with robotics, autonomous systems, embedded systems, or other complex physical systems.
Experience with interactive data visualisation and presenting complex engineering data effectively.
Experience with time-series, event, telemetry, or other high-volume engineering data systems.
Experience with distributed systems and messaging architectures.
Systems programming experience, including networking, IPC, and communication protocols.
Experience designing UI/UX for technical or engineering applications.
Experience developing desktop engineering applications.
Experience analysing large-scale telemetry or diagnostic datasets.

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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.

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, colour, 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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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