Senior Software Engineer — Maps Routing

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

10h•$170,000 - $210,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Routing team determines how every Zipline aircraft moves through the world. You will design safe and efficient flight paths that guide Zips through complex, ever-changing airspace - navigating obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time, with your work showing up in live flights every day. You will build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips - balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. These systems operate in real time and must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand. This is a highly visible, safety-critical function with direct operational impact. The systems you build determine how fast we deliver, how efficiently we scale, and how safely we operate in increasingly complex environments. Engineers on this team work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and maintaining production web applications
3+ years of experience leading projects, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring other engineers
Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services
Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems
Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end
Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems
Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations
Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals

Nice To Haves

Experience with Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS
Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows

Responsibilities

Design safe and efficient flight paths that guide Zips through complex, ever-changing airspace.
Navigate obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time.
Build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips.
Balance reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale.
Account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand in real-time systems.
Design and build systems that directly power flight operations in collaboration with autonomy and flight operations teams.