Senior Autonomy Software Engineer, Validation Tools

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

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. 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. Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As we scale our operations and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential. We’re looking 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 our self-flying aircraft. Our autonomy stack is highly custom-built, and while that gives us unmatched control and performance, it also means standard out-of-the-box testing tools don't work. In this role, you’ll 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 not a QA role. It’s a foundational software engineering position building critical systems that will directly shape how we test, verify, and deploy autonomy safely around the world.

Requirements

5+ 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 deeply with: Autonomy engineers, to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
Collaborate deeply with: Systems and data engineers, to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
Collaborate deeply 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.