About the role
Founded in 2015, 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 and V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft. 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 the Hivemind Solutions DevOps Lead, you will lead, scale, and mentor a high-impact team of DevOps and Infrastructure Engineers responsible for the software development life cycle, build pipelines, developer environment tooling, and release infrastructure across all Hivemind Solutions. Your team is the foundation of our engineering velocity, owning the tools and pipelines that enable hundreds of autonomy, software, and systems engineers to safely and rapidly compile, test, configure, and release AI Pilot capabilities. You will drive the modernization of our build and packaging systems (Conan, Poetry, CMake, CUE, and upcoming adoption of Nix) and ensure our software delivery pipelines, Artifactory registries, developer tooling, and Gov Cloud test environments remain highly performant, scalable, and resilient. \n
What you'll do: Manage and grow a team of specialized DevOps, build, and infrastructure engineers. Set clear technical goals, conduct performance reviews, provide mentorship, and foster a culture of high operational excellence. Maintain, optimize, and standardize our C++, Python, and Node.js build ecosystems across the organization using tools like Conan, CMake, and Poetry, while leading the technical roadmap and migration strategy for emerging reproducible environment tooling such as Nix. Standardize profile environments and lockfile management workflows. Partner closely with the Hivemind Platform (HMP) team to ensure seamless technical alignment, common build patterns, and efficient packaging/dependency update strategies between Platform products and Hivemind Solutions programs. Own the performance, security, and scaling of repository hosting and CI/CD pipelines in GitLab. Partner on integrating GitLab with Jira and Confluence to enable automated, highly visible, and seamless developer workflows. Govern Artifactory remote registries (including internal C++, Python, Docker, and restricted ITAR/CUI repositories) and orchestrate secure container build workflows using BuildKit/Docker with strict credential containment (secret injection, Entra ID integration). Champion the "Developer Experience" (DevEx) by optimizing local development environments. Streamline workstation setup scripts, build out shared developer CLI utilities, and champion best practices for documentation and workspace templates in Confluence. Support the deployment, scaling, and orchestration of the Forge simulation and test orchestrator within Gov Cloud environments. Partner with simulation and test teams to optimize test runner performance and automate simulation-artifact collection pipelines. Collaborate cross-functionally with the Hivemind Platform (HMP) team, Autonomy, Systems Integration, Security, and IT groups to align DevOps roadmaps with broader Hivemind Solutions milestones. Maintain clear visibility into pipeline reliability, build times, queue lengths, and Gov Cloud infrastructure budgets. Required