Senior or Staff Software Engineer – Cloud Communications Platform

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

4h•$180,000 - $250,000

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, making millions of deliveries globally. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. They are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with direct, meaningful impact. Zipline operates a large-scale autonomous system that depends on reliable, low latency communication between vehicles, ground infrastructure, and cloud services. The Cloud Communications team owns the platform that moves critical data from embedded systems into the cloud and ensures that data is reliable, scalable, and observable. This role is for a Senior or Staff Software Engineer to expand and harden this platform. This role focuses on connecting hardware assets to the cloud, hosting and orchestrating new data use cases, and building distributed observability that spans embedded software, cellular networks, and cloud microservices. You will work closely with Embedded and Autonomy teams who design software to get data off devices. Your responsibility is to ensure that data is securely ingested into the cloud, deduplicated, stored, processed, monitored, and made available for both real time and offline workflows. This is a high ownership role with direct impact on flight reliability, operational visibility, and the scalability of Zipline's global network.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building and operating reliable distributed systems
Experience designing APIs and data models for high volume or real time systems
Experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes
Experience building or operating streaming and messaging systems
Strong fundamentals in networking, security, and systems design
Track record of owning problems end to end, from design through production operation
Clear and concise communication skills and comfort working across hardware, embedded, and cloud teams

Nice To Haves

Experience working on systems that interface with hardware or embedded devices
Experience building observability platforms, telemetry pipelines, or reliability tooling
Experience with certificate based authentication and secure device provisioning
Experience debugging complex, cross system failures that span client, network, and server layers
Experience in safety critical or high reliability domains

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the services that connect vehicles, charging and loading stations, fulfillment hardware, and other field deployed infrastructure to the cloud
Design and maintain asset-to-cloud APIs, message schemas, and communication clients in partnership with embedded teams
Build and operate ingestion pipelines for new data streams, including high volume perception and telemetry data generated by vehicles and ground systems
Design systems for deduplication, validation, and scalable storage of high volume telemetry and event data
Ensure secure provisioning of hardware assets, including certificate management and integration with internal provisioning systems
Expand cross-stack telemetry to measure latency and uptime across embedded systems, cellular networks, and cloud infrastructure
Build correlation systems that link events in vehicle software to cloud-side signals such as service errors or streaming backlogs
Develop tooling and dashboards that allow engineering and operations teams to monitor the health of device-to-cloud interactions and track reliability trends
Improve correctness, testability, and auditability of distributed systems that operate in safety critical contexts
Contribute across the stack as needed, from backend services and infrastructure to internal tooling