Senior Cloud Release Engineer - Deployment & Validation Systems

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

15h

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. They design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably, operating on four continents and completing millions of deliveries. The company's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. As a Release Engineer at Zipline, you will play a crucial role in upgrading cloud validation and deployment validation systems. Zipline operates a complex suite of services that interact with safety critical devices in the real world; in this role, you will help battle test and drive projects to improve confidence in system updates before we deploy to production. This role is essential for developing new systems and processes to ensure reliable software rollouts across increasingly complex changes and environments.

Requirements

Extensive experience in release engineering, with a deep understanding of Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-based deployment strategies.
Proven ability to design and implement complex validation systems in a high-reliability environment.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively work across multiple teams - loves working with your customer teams.
Experience with monitoring tools (like prometheus, open telemetry) and deployment gating mechanisms.

Responsibilities

Develop Deployment and Validation Systems: Design and implement robust deployment strategies that ensure high reliability and stability in our software releases. Work with tools like Kubernetes and ArgoCD to manage the deployment lifecycle across multiple environments and namespaces. Incorporate integration validation and regression testing of cloud services into the deployment workflow to ensure that changes interact correctly with existing systems and do not introduce regressions.
Lead Deployment Strategy Innovations: Spearhead initiatives to improve environment propagation and rollout mechanisms, drawing on proposals and current best practices within the industry to enhance our deployment philosophy. Ensure strategies include automated load test suites and integration checkpoints for cloud-native services.
Own the service validation story: Create and manage pipelines for phased mutations of Kubernetes objects and infrastructure that represent services, ensuring deployments meet all testing and stability prerequisites before promotion to production environments. This includes load testing, running regression tests on fully deployed apps with shadowed traffic.
Coordinate Across Teams: Work closely with all software teams to ensure that deployment strategies are aligned with the overall technical architecture and company objectives. Ensure clean slate deployments through effective coordination strategies akin to merge queues.
Monitor and Optimize Release Systems: Implement and oversee monitoring tools such as Prometheus for continuous deployment assessments. Support developing comprehensive readiness and liveness probes for services to ensure operational integrity post-deployment.