Flight Test Engineering Intern - 2026 Summer Intern

Flight Test Engineering Intern - 2026 Summer Intern

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed deep-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include the V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, Hivemind Enterprise, and the Hivemind Vision product lines. With nine offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai.

Our 2026 Summer Internship program is a wonderful opportunity for Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 graduates to immerse themselves in an innovative and mission driven culture. Our 10-week paid internship program will provide you with hands on mentorship, an opportunity to add real contribution to our company via your internship project, and a possible job offer at the end. You will have the chance to make lifelong friendships, expand your network, and learn all about what it's like to work in a high-growth, fast scaling tech unicorn. You'll take part in company sponsored events and enjoy exploring a new city. Read on below to learn more about this unique internship!

A project for the intern to work on would be an LLM-based project reporting generator. Flight test results are often lost to time due to how quickly the flight test team moves, and the lack of requirements for flight test reports. If we required that flight test results be captured in formal flight test reports, either test pace would need to decrease, or more flight test engineers would need to be hired. The team has results posted in a teams channel, and sometimes in Confluence. The goal would be, once Microsoft releases its "gov-safe" LLM (that allows ITAR/CUI data) as promised in November 2025, to use the SAI Flight Test Report template and create an easy way for SAI FTEs to submit their results and generate a formal test report for future reference. This is vital for our business with USGOV and other customers that depend on flight test reports to accept the results of our testing and use these to make decision for contract awards. This would greatly improve the fundamentals of the aviation flight test team, provide immense value to Shield AI and its customers, and could be scaled to other critical functions of the flight test team such as automatically building flight test cards to store in a repository, flight test plans, Flight Readiness Reviews, etc.

Project Goals & Deliverables:

• Create a quick and usable way for the flight test team to generate accurate, informative flight test reports that are presentable and bring value to the customers and aid in securing contracts.
• Train personnel on the flight team to use the feature and see where this tool can be used in other spaces within the company.
• Learn about the features of the V-BAT, flight test discipline, UAS terminology, and other aviation specific information
• Learn about communication to stakeholders which is absolutely vital for engineers to be successful.
• This project will revolutionize the reporting legitimacy of the V-BAT and X-BAT flight test teams.
• Formal reporting will be an absolute necessity as the team transitions to X-BAT from V-BAT and this will assist the team will doing the work of a usually much larger team for 60+ days for each report to do the same quality work with a smaller foot print.
• Weekly status updates with verifiable progress and demonstration to the team that the project is moving in the right direction.
• A final product that allows access by the flight test team to easily and quickly build reports that are useable and don't require significant input by the engineer before submission.

Required Qualifications:

• Introductory knowledge on: LLMs, Aviation knowledge, engineering communication, report writing, UAS payload operation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Microsoft office

$35 - $55 an hour

Rising Bachelor's graduate = $35/hour

Rising Master's graduate = $43/hour

Rising PhD graduate = $55/hour

+ Housing stipend provided for those who qualify. While our People Experience team provides resources and assistance, interns are responsible to find their own housing and travel to and from their office location.

Intern Program Dates:

June 1st - Aug 7th

OR

June 22nd - Aug 28th

*You MUST be available to start on EITHER June 1st or June 22nd.

Shield AI is proud to offer competitive pay and a housing stipend for qualified hires. 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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.