Sr. SWE Datacenter Automation

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

11h•$160,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is hiring a Senior Software Engineer on its Infrastructure team to own infrastructure for its global autonomous delivery platform. The role supports private datacenters and edge compute used for flight operations, simulation, CI/CD, and production services. It spans hardware, virtualization, orchestration, and automation, with direct impact on deployment velocity, compute cost, and operational reliability. The engineer will own the full lifecycle of datacenter compute and storage, from bare-metal provisioning through hypervisor, storage, networking, and Kubernetes operations. They will develop automation, improve reliability and recovery, manage incidents affecting flight operations or telemetry, monitor infrastructure health, and plan capacity and lifecycle maintenance. The role also includes hands-on datacenter work, including racking, cabling, hardware troubleshooting, and coordinating repairs. The position is based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters, with regular on-site presence, participation in on-call rotations, and occasional travel to partner datacenters or field locations. Compensation is a target starting cash range of $160,000–$220,000. Total compensation may also include equity, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, and benefits such as medical, dental, vision, and paid time off.

Requirements

At least 5 years of engineering experience, including at least 4 years owning production datacenter, virtualization, or infrastructure automation systems.
Hands-on expertise with bare-metal provisioning and imaging, including PXE/iPXE, IPMI, and Redfish.
Expertise with hypervisors such as KVM/qemu, ESXi, or equivalent, and storage systems such as Ceph, NVMeoF, or SAN at scale.
Production Kubernetes operations experience, including cluster provisioning and upgrades, control-plane high availability, kubeadm/Cluster API or equivalent, CNI and CSI troubleshooting, and workload scheduling at multi-cluster scale.
Production-grade automation and coding skills in one or more of Python, Go, or Rust.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, and GitOps practices.
Strong networking fundamentals, including VLANs, BGP/EVPN at leaf/spine, LACP, routing, and troubleshooting cluster networking and storage fabrics.
On-call and incident experience, including ownership of postmortems and SLIs/SLOs and driving reliability improvements under operational pressure.
Ability to work on-site at the South San Francisco headquarters on a regular cadence, travel occasionally to partner datacenters or field sites, and perform hands-on rack, cable, and repair work when required.
Experience operating in regulated or safety-sensitive environments and following change-control and audit processes.
Clear communication and ability to take cross-team ownership.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end lifecycle of datacenter compute and storage, including bare-metal provisioning, hypervisor management, SAN/NVMe storage clusters, network configuration, and Kubernetes cluster lifecycle.
Design, build, and operate automation for PXE and firmware workflows, dynamic inventory, image generation, fleet-wide configuration drift detection, and automated recovery playbooks.
Establish and meet reliability targets for provisioning time, node commissioning success, cluster upgrade success, and mean time to recover.
Lead runbook and incident ownership for infrastructure incidents affecting flight operations or telemetry, including on-call duties, serving as incident commander for datacenter platform incidents, and completing postmortems and action items.
Instrument and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for hardware health, hypervisor performance, storage latency, Kubernetes control-plane health, and cluster autoscaling.
Manage cost, capacity, and infrastructure lifecycle, including compute and storage capacity planning, automated reclamation, firmware/BIOS/hypervisor patch pipelines, and cold-standby or failover procedures.
Perform hands-on datacenter work when required, including racking and cabling, troubleshooting hardware failures, capturing forensic logs, and coordinating physical repairs with vendors and field operations.
Partner with flight software, field operations, hardware, and SRE teams to translate operational needs into automated, testable systems.