Senior Software Engineer, Repair and Reliability

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

4d•$180,000 - $270,000

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, focused on serving all humans equally by providing access to essential goods. The company designs, builds, and operates an autonomous logistics system, making deliveries globally. Zipline operates on four continents, completes a delivery every 30 seconds, and has achieved millions of deliveries. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and offers significant time savings. With over 140 million autonomous miles flown, Zipline is transforming access to healthcare, consumer products, and food worldwide. The company seeks practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building impactful systems and scaling the future of logistics. Engineers are expected to approach problems from first principles, embrace adversity, and achieve ambitious goals quickly. The Repair and Reliability Platform team is responsible for building systems that maintain asset health and ensure the operational continuity of the delivery network as aircraft, infrastructure, and fleet complexity increase. This involves creating software for real-time issue detection, orchestrating maintenance and repair workflows, evaluating airworthiness, and facilitating the swift and safe return of assets to service. The team owns the operational backbone that integrates fleet health, maintenance execution, technician operations, and return-to-service decisions into a unified reliability platform. The systems developed by this team directly impact aircraft availability, delivery capacity, operational safety, and the network's ability to scale reliably.

Requirements

Experience building reliable production systems in operationally complex environments.
Ability to translate ambiguous reliability and maintenance problems into durable software systems.
Strong backend and systems engineering judgment combined with product instinct and operational awareness.
Deep care for correctness, reliability, safety, and operator trust.
Skill in simplifying operational complexity and designing scalable abstractions for fleets, assets, and workflows.
Comfort working in environments where software, hardware, and operations are tightly coupled.
Willingness to own systems with real-world consequences and high reliability expectations.
Desire to shape architecture, operational workflows, and long-term platform direction.
Ability to use AI tooling effectively as a force multiplier.
Strong engineering rigor, judgment, and accountability.

Responsibilities

Own software in the critical path of fleet reliability and maintenance operations.
Develop fleet health and asset visibility systems to track the operational state of aircraft, infrastructure, and distributed site assets.
Build maintenance orchestration platforms for issue management, work orders, technician workflows, and scheduled maintenance execution.
Create airworthiness and configuration control systems to evaluate aircraft readiness for return to service.
Implement usage tracking and lifecycle systems to monitor component wear and inform preventative maintenance policies.
Develop operational tooling for maintenance teams, service engineering, and flight operations to diagnose issues, coordinate interventions, and maintain fleet readiness.
Build reliability automation and event-driven systems to connect live operational signals with issue detection and repair workflows.