Chief Engineer - Launch & Recovery Vehicle

Company: Shield AI
Location: San Diego
Posted on: January 21, 2026

Job Description:

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. Job Description: The Chief Engineer for the Launch & Recovery Vehicle (LRV) leads the technical development, integration, and validation of a mobile launch and recovery system supporting a Group 5 unmanned aerial vehicle. This role acts as the technical authority and product owner, ensuring the LRV meets mission performance, reliability, and safety objectives through disciplined engineering, rigorous testing, and cross-functional integration. You will define what the vehicle must do, how it will do it, and prove that it can — while managing risk and guiding the team through design, analysis, test, and field operations. What youll do: • Own the technical direction and ensure the product architecture fulfills mission needs and system constraints. • Translate user and stakeholder requirements into verifiable system capabilities with defined margins and measures. • Lead cross-discipline integration, ensuring mechanical, electrical, software, and test teams deliver a coherent design. • Drive risk reduction and test strategy—plan, prioritize, and execute early demos and stress-to-failure tests. • Maintain the functional baseline and verify that each subsystem meets its allocated performance and interface requirements. • Guide trade studies balancing performance, cost, schedule, manufacturability, and reliability. • Ensure analytical models are correlated to test data, closing the loop between simulation and experiment. • Control the technical baseline and configuration, approving major design and requirement changes. • Chair or support technical reviews (PDR, CDR, TRR) and enforce closure of open actions. • Own the risk register, quantify technical and programmatic risk, and ensure mitigation plans are executable and tracked. • Serve as the single point of technical accountability to leadership and customers. • Define and maintain verification and validation (V&V) plans that trace requirements to tests and results. • Communicate technical status using transparent, quantitative metrics on performance, maturity, and uncertainty. • Integrate product development with manufacturing and sustainment to ensure designs are buildable and supportable. • Foster a disciplined, data-driven engineering culture that values early learning, iteration, and truth-seeking. Required qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Physics, or related field (Mechanical/Aerospace ideal). • 10 years leading multidisciplinary engineering teams delivering complex electro-mechanical or automation systems. • Proven record of owning system performance from requirements through test and field validation • Strong systems engineering discipline — requirements traceability, margins, and verification planning. • Skilled in risk-based decision-making and tradeoffs across performance, cost, and schedule • Broad technical fluency across mechanical, electrical, software, and controls domains. • Experience managing product lifecycle: design, build, integration, and test. • Comfortable leading technical reviews (PDR, CDR, TRR, FRR) and closing actions to standard. • Effective at cross-functional coordination with manufacturing, test, and operations. • Clear communicator — able to translate technical reality to executive and customer audiences.

Keywords: Shield AI, Yorba Linda , Chief Engineer - Launch & Recovery Vehicle, Engineering , San Diego, California