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:
The Senior Director of Operations & Sustainment (O&S) is responsible for ensuring customers successfully deploy, operate, maintain, and evolve the company's software and VIDAR hardware products throughout their lifecycle. O&S owns the post-development operational ecosystem that enables Hivemind Vision (HMV) integrated VIDAR, Hivemind Enterprise (HME) software and the Hivemind Solutions (HMS) service to scale while maintaining exceptional customer satisfaction.
This is an exciting opportunity to build the Hivemind O&S organization from the ground up. The organization serves as the bridge between Product Engineering, Customer Success, and Field Operations by enabling successful product deployment, sustaining operational readiness, providing technical support, capturing customer feedback, and driving continuous improvement.
This role sits at the center of all Hivemind business lines, ensuring customer satisfaction post-delivery. This is a hands-on leadership role that requires both strong systems engineering instincts and the organizational discipline to build a team and establish the processes, systems, and engineering rigor necessary to support a growing customer base while ensuring issues rapidly inform future product development.
What you'll do:
Establish the organization, practices, tools, and ways of working which manage the following:
Product Deployment & Integration
- Lead teams responsible for installation, integration, and operational deployment of the HME Software within customer environments.
- Develop repeatable deployment methodologies, tools, and best practices that reduce deployment timelines and improve customer outcomes.
- Support direct HME customers integrating and building upon the HME, HMS teams delivering customized customer solutions, and HMV customers integrating VIDAR and associated software.
Training, Documentation & Knowledge Enablement
- Own the strategy and execution for customer education and operational knowledge management.
- Maintain and continuously improve training curriculum, technical publications, installation guides, troubleshooting documentation, and operational manuals.
- Develop knowledge transfer materials that enable customers to effectively deploy, configure, maintain, troubleshoot, and enhance their systems.
- Produce technical content and playbooks for Forward Deployed Engineers, Customer Support Engineers, and field personnel to resolve recurring issues and efficiently collect diagnostic data.
Sustaining Engineering
- Lead engineering efforts supporting products operating in customer environments.
- Track and manage customer configurations and upgrades.
- Provide technical expertise for deployment support, issue resolution, and operational readiness.
- Ensure technical issues are documented, reproduced, prioritized, and communicated effectively to HMV, HME, and HMS Engineering organizations.
- Drive root cause analysis and corrective actions that improve product reliability and customer experience.
Test & Evaluation
- Drive rapid validation and verification activities supporting customer-critical hardware repairs, bug fixes and software updates.
- Develop lightweight but rigorous test methodologies for sustaining engineering changes.
- Coordinate closely with Engineering to accelerate customer-impacting releases.
Customer Support Engineering
- Own the technical support engineering organization serving as the initial point of contact for customer-reported issues and feature requests.
- Establish technical triage processes that rapidly classify, prioritize, and route customer issues.
- Provide technically proficient support beyond traditional call-center functions.
- Define service level objectives and operational metrics for customer responsiveness.
- Ensure customer feedback is systematically captured and incorporated into product planning as appropriate.
Operational Excellence & Engineering Enablement
- Establish the systems engineering discipline, operational processes, and governance supporting all Operations & Sustainment functions.
- Define standard operating procedures, workflows, quality standards, and engineering best practices.
- Develop operational metrics and dashboards to monitor deployment performance, customer support effectiveness, issue resolution, and sustainment health.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase efficiency, scalability, and customer satisfaction.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Serve as the operational interface between Engineering, Program Management, Customer Success, Forward Deployed Engineering, and Customer Support.
- Translate operational insights and customer feedback into actionable product improvements.
- Partner with HMV, HME, and HMS leadership to ensure sustainment capabilities evolve alongside product growth.
- Balance customer responsiveness with long-term product quality and engineering priorities.
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field.
- 15 years of experience leading software operations, sustaining engineering, technical support, or product lifecycle organizations.
- Experience with government, defense, or mission-critical software systems
- Experience supporting sustainment or ILS organizations for integrated hardware and software products.
- Demonstrated success building operational organizations from the ground up supporting both product and customer delivery teams.
- Strong systems engineering mindset with experience establishing scalable operational processes.
- Experience leading cross-functional technical teams through complex customer issues and product improvements.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience in AI/ML platforms or autonomous systems
- Experience with Software Development Kits (SDKs), APIs, or developer platforms.
- Experience supporting both commercial software products and customized customer solutions.
- Familiarity with technical training development, knowledge management, and documentation systems.
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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.