Senior or Staff Autonomy Software Engineer, Differential GNSS

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h

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 customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on them 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 Zipline has built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations. Their 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. They operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Their team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. They are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds. If you enjoy dissecting the raw measurements from your GNSS receiver, fusing them with IMU, camera, and ground-station data, and feeding everything into a highly robust state estimator, this role would be a perfect opportunity. Zipline's vehicles operate all around the globe, and must be able to complete their missions reliably in the face of all weather conditions, and even in the event of sensor failures. They need to build a system that handles a wide variety of geographic environments and operates without high-definition maps. They strive to continuously improve their systems so that they never encounter the same problem twice. You will be expected to stretch your skills and to experiment with new approaches to filtering and measurement. You will design systems to gather data from every mission, so that you can confirm things are working as expected–or so that Zipline can reproduce and fix the problem if not.

Requirements

A degree in physics or an engineering discipline.
Experience with state estimation, probabilistic filtering, GNSS RTK and raw measurements, IMU data, sensor modeling and simulation.
Understanding of calculus, linear algebra, non-linear optimization, and computational numerical methods.
Experience in building high performance software systems using compiled languages (C/C++/Rust/Ada/etc.).
The capability to solve complex problems with little supervision as part of an integrated team.
Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.

Responsibilities

Extract the maximum value from the observations of our GNSS hardware: integrating all the data available from our ground station network when available, but also building robust systems which handle extended communications outages without a large amount of drift.
Design systems which deal with intermittent GNSS availability, ensuring our vehicle can make use of both GNSS and vision data, while handling failures in either one at any time.
Perform trade studies to understand the value of new sensors or processing approaches to vehicle performance and reliability.
Analyze the performance of systems both in simulation and using data from vehicles operating in the field to find under-performing facets of the system, and devise solutions which bring them up to speed.
Participate in code review with a strong and capable team of engineers building highly reliable software in the Rust programming language.