Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h•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. They 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. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. Zipline is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. The Field Systems Engineering (FSE) team operates at the intersection of Engineering and Operations, ensuring that the equipment designed is safe, robust, and reliable. As a Senior Embedded Software Engineer on the FSE team, you will play a crucial role in optimizing the performance and reliability of Zipline’s long-range drone systems, specifically the Platform 1 vehicle. This involves working closely with cross-functional engineers and flight operators to identify friction points, leading anomaly investigations, defining data-driven requirements, and driving execution of improvement projects to enhance system reliability, ease of maintenance, and overall usability. The role may also involve stepping into a technical program management role to unblock other engineers, align priorities, and drive key projects forward. Success requires an entrepreneurial mindset, strong technical foundation, excellent communication skills, and the ability to translate between the needs of operators in the field and the engineers building the system.

Requirements

8+ years of professional experience in embedded software development, integration & test, mechatronics/robotics engineering, or similar, for hardware products in a safety-critical field, e.g. aerospace, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles.
Proficiency in one or more “strongly typed” language: Rust, C++, C.
Familiarity with software development practices, including version control (e.g. Git), testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
Ability to analyze field performance data, and develop data analysis tools in languages like Python, SQL, MATLAB.
Willingness to work some nights/weekends and travel, including to international sites as needed.
Eligibility to work in the US.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrable history of assuming ownership of complex engineering problems, and driving them from inception to solution.
Experience leading engineering projects with multi-disciplinary teams to solve technical problems in a fast-paced environment.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Demonstrated engineering intuition, ability to think critically, and be comfortable with ambiguity.
Creative problem solver that can make design and development decisions with limited or imperfect data.
Strong sense of accountability and integrity, and are not afraid to challenge the status quo.
Self-motivated with strong learning, multi-tasking, organizational, and documentation skills.

Responsibilities

Optimize and improve a complex, real-world system used daily by operators—delivering timely solutions while ensuring all changes are thoroughly validated for safety and reliability.
Travel to our international operations centers to understand how the system works in the real world.
Become the go-to expert on the existing flight software stack, along with its development, testing, and deployment tools.
Support triage and risk assessment of emergent technical issues, balancing urgency with sound engineering judgment.
Lead new projects to drive operations efficiency and increase system robustness.
Drive data-driven analysis of system behavior using tools like Databricks to diagnose issues, evaluate performance, and quantify the impact of improvements.
Build and maintain strong working relationships across the organization—from operations and systems engineering to software leads and regulatory partners.
Identify, document, and drive improvements to the software development and deployment lifecycle for the long-range drone platform.
Collaborate across teams—global operations, engineering, and leadership—to shape the strategic software roadmap for the platform.
Design, coordinate, and execute high-impact testing campaigns that validate new features, improvements, or fixes in real-world conditions.