Senior Software Engineer - Motor Controls

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

16h•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, making deliveries every 30 seconds across four continents, with millions of deliveries completed including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. Their customers include prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants, and global businesses. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and provides fast delivery, having safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles. They seek practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with direct, meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. As a Senior Motor Control Engineer, you will be responsible for shipping high-performance motor controller firmware for Zipline’s proprietary motor controllers. This involves close collaboration with electrical engineers, structures and mechanism designers, flight software developers, and test-site operations teams. The role offers a unique opportunity to learn from a strong multi-disciplinary team and swiftly ship features linked to the delivery experience. Firmware development uses C++, with Rust and Python for tooling. The team utilizes hardware- and software-in-the-loop test infrastructure for validation, queries large data-sets for data-driven decisions, and builds analyses in Matlab, Julia, or Python for controls designs and Monte-Carlo simulations.

Requirements

Fluency in C/C++, and excitement about writing code in Rust and Python.
Eagerness to learn in a fast-paced safety-critical environment.
Some experience with mechatronic control systems: hobby projects or professional experience are applicable.
Curiosity and a willingness to work in a variety of embedded environments, from running on bare metal, to using a RTOS and integrating with embedded Linux.
Experience supporting robotic systems in the real-world, in particular addressing the long-tail of edge-cases and rare events to guarantee safety, reliability, and performance.
A systems-engineering mindset, and an eye for finding efficient solutions to problems that may lie outside your core competencies.
Strong executive communication skills, to efficiently communicate about your work with stakeholders outside your technical domain.
You must be able to work on-site in South San Francisco, CA.

Nice To Haves

A background in electronics design would be appreciated, but is not required.

Responsibilities

Design estimators and controllers for propulsion motors and actuators, in close collaboration with the vehicle controls team.
Implement these controllers in C++, targeting a bare-metal ARM microcontroller.
Write peripheral drivers for new revisions of Zipline’s motor controller hardware.
Get your hands dirty validating your firmware on the bench and in flight tests.
Understand and improve the reliability of the flight software system as a whole, working with hardware and systems engineers to develop comprehensive fault management strategies and hardware-in-the-loop tests.
Build vehicle simulations in Rust to validate and regression test Zipline’s firmware.
Collaborate with electrical engineers to bring-up and validate new inverter designs.
Build and maintain automated systems to monitor the performance of our fleet and direct maintenance activity.