Firmware Engineer Intern (Spring 2027)

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

13d•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, 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. Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries. 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. The firmware team owns the embedded firmware on all of our microcontroller systems on our aircraft and delivery system. We range from the application layer to the platform and foundation it’s built on. Including bootloaders, RTOS integration, serial and ethernet communication, up to battery management and motor control. Zipline aircraft depend on embedded firmware to execute critical flight and safety functions across a network of microcontrollers and embedded Linux computers. This software must perform reliably as aircraft move from manufacturing into delivery operations at field sites around the world, including locations that are difficult to access over a network. You will own C++ firmware and supporting tools that are critical to the safety and operation of these systems. While making the system more observable and easier to diagnose at scale. Working alongside electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers, you will turn hardware behavior and flight data into reliable, maintainable 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.
Rising seniors are preferred.

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 our microcontroller systems and the communication buses that connect them, across 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.