Principal Software Engineer, Application Software

Zipline

3d•$225,000 - $300,000

About The Position

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 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.

Requirements

Experience building and shipping production software systems
Strong full-stack fundamentals across frontend, backend, services, and data
Ability to turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into simple, reliable software
Combine product instinct with systems judgment
Care deeply about reliability, correctness, usability, and operational trust
Enjoy working directly with users and stakeholders to understand real workflows
Desire to shape architecture and product direction, not just implement scoped features
Excited to use modern AI tooling to increase velocity while maintaining strong engineering rigor
Ability to learn quickly and solve the right problems

Nice To Haves

Experience with Go, Python, React, gRPC, Kafka, PostgreSQL, AWS, Bazel, Grafana, and Honeycomb

Responsibilities

Own high-impact software across one or more parts of Zipline’s application platform, such as partner, merchant, and internal operations tools; marketplace, fulfillment, billing, and support systems; network operations software for simulation, real-time visibility, intervention, orchestration, maintenance, and asset health; or enterprise systems that power manufacturing, supply chain, inventory, traceability, finance, quality, and field operations.
Work closely with the people who use these systems every day, from operators and field teams to manufacturing, supply chain, finance, commercial, product, and partner teams.
Identify ambiguous problems, design durable systems, build production software end to end, and drive adoption.
Turn complex real-world operations into reliable systems that scale.
Give operators and partners real-time visibility into a complex physical network.
Keep the network moving when demand shifts, weather changes, assets degrade, or capacity gets tight.
Build financial and operational systems where every transaction, part, order, and aircraft state is traceable.
Automate workflows across manufacturing, supply chain, fulfillment, and field operations without losing correctness.
Design software that scales across countries, metros, verticals, and millions of deliveries.
Make technical and product decisions, and help shape how Zipline scales.