Assistant Product Owner, CCA Mission Autonomy (Platform Integration) (R5849)

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.

The Assistant Product Owner (APO) supports Shield AI's delivery of mission autonomy (MA) to the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program — the first time that USAF has decoupled, for procurement purposes, MA from the airframe as a standalone capability. In this context, the ‘product’ is the Autonomy Implementation package, including Mission Autonomy itself, the Human Machine Interface (HMI) software, A-GRA compliance, mission systems, training, cybersecurity, and the full suite of implementation/installation software.

Shield AI’s CCA programs adopt an agile framework and are organized as a leadership tier overseeing multiple shoals (from platform integration to autonomy capabilities), each with multiple feature crews. In the first instance, the APO will support the Platform Integration and Support shoal (Shoal 1), which is responsible for integrating MA with multiple platforms and with the operator interface. The APO will work in collaboration with the Shoal Lead, Systems Engineering Lead, and four Feature Crew Leads and report directly to the Product Owner/Manager, who is part of the program leadership team. The APO owns the day-to-day health of the Shoal 1 product backlog in Jira (and Confluence), and is expected to maintain an integrated picture of how customer priorities, epics, interfaces, dependencies, and milestones relate, and to make ‘product’ legible and accessible to the broader team.