Senior Cloud Engineer (SD/TX/DC)

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.    
Job Description: Shield AI is looking for a Cloud Engineer to support its leadership in applied artificial intelligence development. In this role, you will be responsible for engineering, deploying, provisioning, and managing critical cloud systems that drive innovation across Shield AI’s public and private cloud environments, both domestically and internationally. As part of the Cloud and Infrastructure team within Enterprise Operations, you will play a key role in ensuring the performance, scalability, and reliability of these systems to support various business units. This position may involve occasional travel to Shield AI locations.

What you'll do:

• Engineering:
• Oversee the day-to-day management and optimization of cloud-based infrastructure (e.g., Azure, AWS).
• Support and optimize cloud and virtual machine environments, assisting with capacity planning, performance monitoring, security compliance, and vulnerability remediation.
• Assist in implementing and maintaining infrastructure systems, including servers, storage, backup solutions, and disaster recovery processes, for both public and private clouds.
• Demonstrate a willingness to learn and work with familiar or unfamiliar operating systems and workloads with the desire to leverage automation tasks for repeatable tasks.
• Author and produce the necessary documentation for engineered and maintained systems along with associated processes which supporting teams can leverage.
• Assist in researching, recommending, and developing innovative solutions for complex requirements and issue resolution.
• Participate in Agile methodologies and sound engineering principles.


• Operations and Support:
• Perform daily system monitoring, verifying the integrity and availability of all server resources, systems and key processes, reviewing system and application logs.
• Support system maintenance and upgrades, including OS patching, software configuration, hardware updates, and performance tuning to ensure optimal cloud infrastructure performance.
• Provide escalated support for operational issues possibly during and after normal business hours for systems, workloads, and Kubernetes AI infrastructure.
• Analyze, troubleshoot and resolve system infrastructure and software issues.
• Possess the capacity to participate in on-call, emergency, or maintenance roles.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline, or at least 4 years of experience plus an engineer level certification, Azure/AWS Associate, or another similar level certification.
• 4 years’ experience supporting applications and systems in a production environment, preferably for a software and/or manufacturing development company.
• Comfortable with operational efficiencies utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience in automating repetitive tasks using scripting languages such as PowerShell, Python, or Bash.
• Experience with deployment and systems administration of at least one type of Linux distribution (i.e. RHEL, Ubuntu)
• Experience with concepts of Microsoft Windows Server administration, Azure and Active Directory environments
• Ability to work independently to accomplish assigned tasks.
• Possesses organizational skills, with a process-oriented mindset, attention to detail, and effective verbal and written communication abilities.
• Solution-oriented, constructive approach to problem-solving.
• Local to San Diego, CA, Dallas, TX and Washington D.C.

Preferred qualifications:

• Proven engineering experience with deploying and maintaining workloads in Azure public cloud
• Fundamental understanding of at least one type of virtualization platform for private cloud (i.e. VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.).
• Experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or cloud infrastructure roles. 
• Familiarity with configuratio