Autonomy Software Engineer, Validation Tools

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As operations scale and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential. This role is for a deeply technical software engineer to join the Autonomy Validation team, a core team responsible for building the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support software validation across the entire Autonomy organization. This includes planning, perception, control, and all of the decision-making logic that powers Zipline's self-flying aircraft. Zipline's autonomy stack is highly custom-built, meaning standard out-of-the-box testing tools are not sufficient. In this position, you will take ownership of developing robust internal platforms for validation, enabling both simulation at scale and rigorous scenario testing, so that autonomy engineers can ship with confidence. This is a foundational software engineering position focused on building critical systems that will directly shape how Zipline tests, verifies, and deploys autonomy safely around the world, and is not a QA role.

Requirements

3+ years of experience building systems for testing, simulation, or safety validation — ideally in autonomy, aerospace, robotics, or other real-time, safety-critical environments.
A strong software engineering foundation, including fluency in C++, Rust, C, or C#.
Experience with custom simulation tools, game engines, or scenario generation frameworks.
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, and distributed execution pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
A track record of building tools or platforms used by other engineers — infrastructure that enables teams to move fast while maintaining safety and quality.

Responsibilities

Build and own the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large-scale and high-fidelity testing of autonomy under real-world and edge-case conditions.
Develop custom tools for validation and testing of autonomy components that plug into our internal autonomy development stack.
Create scalable, reliable, and automated solutions for running, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks across autonomy org.
Collaborate with Autonomy engineers to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
Collaborate with Systems and data engineers to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
Collaborate with Flight test and QA teams to connect real-world results back into test tools and CI loops.
Establish best practices for software release validation, helping ensure our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production-ready.
Contribute to internal docs, standards, and validation workflows that scale across the autonomy organization.