Firmware Engineer Intern (Summer 2027)

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

14d•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve all humans equally by providing access to essential goods. The company designs, builds, and operates an autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries globally. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and offers rapid delivery. The company seeks practical problem solvers motivated by building impactful systems and scaling the future of logistics. The firmware team is responsible for the embedded firmware on all microcontroller systems in Zipline's aircraft and delivery system, covering everything from the application layer to the foundational platform, including bootloaders, RTOS integration, communication protocols, battery management, and motor control. This role involves owning C++ firmware and supporting tools critical to the safety and operation of Zipline aircraft, which rely on embedded firmware for flight and safety functions across various microcontrollers and embedded Linux computers. The software must be reliable in diverse operational environments, including remote locations. The intern will focus on enhancing system observability and ease of diagnosis at scale, collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams to translate hardware behavior and flight data into robust software for deployed aircraft.

Requirements

Passionate about learning about firmware, realtime systems, Zipline’s aircraft and systems, and our mission.
Prior internship or design team experience.
Experience with writing C or C++.
Excellent grades in embedded systems classes.

Responsibilities

Design and build C++ firmware for a distributed system of aircraft microcontrollers.
Develop reliable Ethernet, serial, and other microcontroller communication interfaces.
Define platform-level interfaces and reusable firmware components that support multiple aircraft subsystems.
Own the predictable and reliable performance of microcontroller systems and their communication buses, covering startup, real-time operation, fault handling, and recovery.
Optimize real-time behavior, including CPU utilization, memory usage, scheduling latency, timing jitter, and resource contention.
Develop metrics, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities to prepare the system for field deployment at scale.
Develop Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test and validate firmware behavior.