Senior Staff Lab Manager (R5090)

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.

What you'll do

Lab Strategy & Infrastructure

Own the overall vision, architecture, and roadmap for engineering laboratory infrastructure.

Design, build, and commission new laboratory spaces to support evolving engineering programs.

Define standards for laboratory layout, power distribution, networking, cooling, safety, security, and scalability.

Develop long-term modernization plans to ensure laboratory capabilities remain aligned with engineering needs.

Evaluate and implement new technologies, tools, and automation to improve laboratory efficiency and reliability.

Lab Operations

Own day-to-day laboratory operations across multiple engineering disciplines.

Develop scheduling processes that maximize lab utilization while minimizing conflicts and downtime.

Plan and coordinate preventative maintenance, calibration, repairs, and equipment lifecycle management.

Manage laboratory uptime, availability, and operational readiness.

Establish operational metrics, KPIs, and reporting for lab performance.

Engineering Systems & Integration

Support complex hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), software-in-the-loop (SIL), integration, and validation environments.

Develop laboratory standards for networking, compute infrastructure, storage, instrumentation, and data acquisition.

Partner with engineering teams to architect robust development and test environments.

Ensure laboratories support rapid system integration and reproducible testing.

Leadership

Lead and develop a multidisciplinary team of lab engineers, infrastructure engineers, and technicians.

Recruit, mentor, and grow high-performing technical staff.

Prioritize work across multiple concurrent engineering programs.

Establish standard operating procedures, documentation, and best practices.

Foster a culture of safety, ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.

Collaboration

Work closely with Hardware, Electrical, Mechanical, Software, Systems, Manufacturing, and Test Engineering organizations.

Partner with IT, Facilities, Security, and EH&S teams to deliver reliable and secure laboratory environments.

Manage vendor relationships for laboratory equipment, infrastructure, and service providers.

Required qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.

10+ years of experience supporting complex engineering laboratories or technical infrastructure.

5+ years of technical leadership or people management experience.

Demonstrated experience designing and building engineering labs from concept through deployment.

Strong understanding of laboratory infrastructure, including

Power distribution

Network architecture

Server and storage systems

Instrumentation

Environmental controls

Safety systems

Experience managing equipment lifecycle, maintenance, calibration, upgrades, and modernization.

Experience supporting multidisciplinary engineering organizations.

Laboratory infrastructure design and architecture

System-level engineering and integration

Networking (Ethernet, VLANs, managed switches, routing)

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and Software-in-the-loop (SIL) systems

Asset management and inventory systems

Preferred qualifications

Experience supporting robotics, aerospace, defense, automotive, or autonomous systems development.

Experience with secure laboratory environments and classified or regulated development environments.

Knowledge of systems engineering processes and system architecture.

Experience implementing laboratory automation and infrastructure-as-code practices.

Familiarity with cloud-connected engineering workflows and hybrid infrastructure.

Programming and scripting experience

Python, MATLAB, C/C++, etc.