Autonomy Platform Software Engineer

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Zipline

South San Francisco, California, USA

On-site

Posted March 27, 2026

Job Description

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About You and the Role

You’re a systems-minded SWE who lives at the boundary of autonomy, embedded Linux, and hardware. Reporting to the Head of Droid Autonomy, you’ll own the delivery runtime end to end. You’ll bring up compute and sensors on Jetson/Linux, design flight/runtime orchestration—mission state machines, behavior gating, safe-state transitions—and build observability (logging, health monitoring, replay) for fast, trustworthy post-flight validation.

You bring deep Linux expertise (kernel, userspace, performance tuning), experience shipping robotic applications to real customers, and strong software architecture chops in strongly-typed languages (Rust/C++; Python for tooling). You communicate clearly, make legible, auditable safety decisions, and bridge HW↔SW while leading cross-functional stakeholders to closure on complex trade-offs.

What You'll Do:

Integrate and own Delivery Zip runtime software: Bring up, configure, and validate new compute and sensor hardware across our autonomy stack.
Develop system-level observability: Build logging, health monitoring, and replay tooling for post-flight analysis and validation.
Drive reliability of software: Autonomy subsystem requires a highly reliable platform to build solutions on.
Develop and maintain embedded software: Write robust, low-latency Rust/C++ code on embedded Linux.
Design flight/runtime orchestration logic: Build mission state machines, behavior gating, and safe-state transitions across compute nodes under real-time constraints.
Validate safety and performance: Use SIL/HIL and real-flight telemetry to measure deterministic behavior and prove reliability before deployment.

What You'll Bring:

3+ years of experience in delivering robotic applications to real-world customers.
Strong expertise in low level OS/linux/jetson
Strong software engineering skills, with proficiency in at least one strongly typed language; we use Rust and C++ onboard, and Python for tooling
Strong system mindset; able to see how the full system comes together
Deep expertise in embedded Linux development, including experience with kernel modifications, userspace programming, and performance tuning
Strong software architecture skills, with experience designing and shipping solutions for complex real-world use cases
Strong communication and documentation; you make complex safety decisions legible and auditable.
Able to bridge the gap between HW and SW, to ensure a robust system.
Technical leadership to bring multiple stakeholders together to drive complex decisions forward.