Autonomy Software Engineer, Flight Management & Safety

ZipLine•South San Francisco, CA

60d•Onsite

About The Position

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world's most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda's national blood delivery network and Ghana's COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through our technology that includes robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain. About You & the Role Own the flight-critical runtime that keeps Zipline aircraft in a known safe state-no matter what the world throws at them. You'll architect and ship the autonomy safety layer that orchestrates missions, detects/diagnoses faults, and executes mitigation and recovery across planning, perception, and controls. This is deep systems work in Rust/C++ with tight real-time constraints: you'll make high-judgment design decisions, prove them in SIL/HIL and flight logs, and raise the bar on reliability for a global, safety-critical fleet.

Requirements

8+ years building production software for robotics, aerospace, AV, or other safety-critical embedded systems.
Expert in Rust and/or C++ (C as a plus) for real-time, fault-tolerant applications on embedded Linux/RTOS.
Demonstrated systems thinking: clear interface design, resource budgeting, and trade-offs under timing/safety/power constraints.
Hands-on with SIL/HIL, scenario validation, log replay, and fault injection; you measure reliability, not just functionality.
Track record of shipping autonomy features (mission logic, supervision, watchdogs, health monitoring) into noisy, dynamic real-world environments.
Comfort in HW/SW co-design: you can reason about sensors, compute, comms, and actuators well enough to make robust software decisions.
Strong communication and documentation; you make complex safety decisions legible and auditable.

Responsibilities

Design the mission/flight manager: build the state machines and orchestration logic that govern mission sequencing, safe-state transitions, and behavior gating under latency and resource constraints.
Own fault management end-to-end: implement detection, isolation, mitigation, and recovery (FIMR) for sensors, compute, comms, power, and actuation; ensure graceful degradation and continuity of service.
Ship flight-critical Rust/C++: develop and maintain core onboard components with strong observability (health, logs, metrics) and testability (deterministic replay, assertions, invariants).
Prove safety before flight: define success criteria and build the tooling-scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, log-replay harnesses, fault-injection-to validate behaviors across edge cases and long-tail conditions.
Integrate across autonomy: partner with planning, perception, and controls to set interfaces, hazards/assumptions, and escalation paths; codify contracts that the runtime enforces.
Close the loop with operations: turn fleet telemetry and incident reviews into requirements and fixes; drive MTBF/MTTR improvements and intervention-rate reductions.
Lead with systems judgment: write design docs, perform hazard analysis (e.g., FMEA/STPA-style), run design/PR reviews, and mentor engineers on deep-stack ownership.

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