Senior Software Engineer - Field Systems

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is the world's largest and most experienced drone delivery service, dedicated to providing access to food, medicine, and essential goods globally. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system, completing millions of deliveries across four continents, including critical medical supplies, food, and retail products. Zipline's system aims to strengthen supply chains, reduce congestion, and improve lives, having safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles. The company seeks problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with direct, meaningful impact. The Field Systems Engineering (FSE) team operates at the intersection of Engineering and Operations, ensuring the safety, robustness, and reliability of Zipline's equipment, particularly their long-range drone platform (Platform 1) which has been operational in Rwanda since 2016. As a Senior Software Field Systems Engineer, you will optimize the performance and reliability of these drone systems. This role involves collaborating with cross-functional engineers and flight operators to identify software friction points, leading anomaly investigations, defining data-driven requirements, and executing improvement projects to enhance system reliability, ease of maintenance, and usability. You will implement direct software improvements or coordinate efforts across teams, sometimes acting as a technical program manager to unblock engineers and align priorities. Success requires an entrepreneurial mindset, strong technical foundation, excellent communication, and the ability to bridge the gap between field operators' needs and engineering development.

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
You are willing to work some nights/weekends and travel, including to international sites as needed
You are eligible 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.