Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Zipline • South San Francisco, CA

3d

About The Position

Autonomous aircraft need onboard software that communicates, updates, reports health, and recovers predictably in safety-critical environments. The Embedded Platform team builds the middleware and infrastructure beneath the flight software stack on embedded Linux systems. You will own shared platform capabilities from architecture through production delivery, with success measured by dependable updates, diagnosable failures, stable service interfaces, and reliable integration for flight-software teams. Senior engineers lead substantial services and integrations; Staff engineers set direction across platform boundaries, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and establish standards used across the shared stack.

Requirements

• 5–12 years developing embedded, systems, or platform software in production environments.
• Strong Rust, C++, or comparable systems-programming skills, with experience delivering reliable software on embedded Linux.
• Working knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, networking, IPC, and distributed or multi-process systems.
• Ability to debug complex behavior across services, operating systems, networks, and hardware.
• Experience designing technical interfaces and carrying cross-functional integrations through delivery.
• For Staff-level scope, a record of leading architecture across multiple systems and influencing decisions beyond an individual component.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in aerospace, robotics, automotive, industrial, medical, or another high-reliability domain; autonomy, OTA, telemetry, Linux internals, or resource-constrained optimization are relevant.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, implementation, validation, and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft.
• Define and evolve IPC, communications-bridge, OTA-update, logging, observability, and service-lifecycle interfaces used across flight software.
• Deliver production Rust and C++ with testing, diagnostics, and maintainability built into each platform capability.
• Set technical direction for cross-service platform architecture, including interface decisions and tradeoffs that affect multiple flight-software teams.
• Partner with flight-software, hardware, and integration teams to ensure platform services operate reliably on embedded Linux aircraft systems.
• Investigate failures across software, operating-system, network, and hardware boundaries; drive corrective changes that improve reliability, performance, and operational visibility.
• Establish design-review and engineering practices that make services safer to deploy, easier to diagnose, and practical for downstream teams to adopt.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed