Senior Staff Lab Manager (R5090)

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: We are seeking an experienced Senior Staff Lab Manager to lead the design, development, operation, and long-term strategy of our engineering laboratories. This is a highly technical leadership role responsible for creating world-class lab environments that enable hardware and software engineering teams to rapidly develop, integrate, test, and validate complex systems. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong operational leadership, driving lab architecture, infrastructure modernization, asset management, and engineering support while leading a team of engineers and technicians.

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.