Senior Software Engineer - Routing Engine

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

1d•$160,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Zipline is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Routing team, which determines how its aircraft move through the world. The engineer will design safe, efficient flight paths through complex and changing airspace, accounting for obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time. The role involves building optimization algorithms that compute routes for autonomous aircraft while balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. This is a highly visible, safety-critical position with direct operational impact. Routing systems must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and changing demand. The engineer will build real-time, high-availability services with low latency, deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and fault tolerance, collaborating closely with autonomy and flight operations teams. The role combines algorithmic problem-solving with production systems engineering at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. Zipline uses AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows to support productivity while maintaining rigor in system design and code quality. The current technology stack includes Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, though experience with specific technologies is not required.

Requirements

Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services.
Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems.
An ownership mindset and 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.
Ability to use modern AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality.

Nice To Haves

Experience with technologies in Zipline’s current stack: Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS.

Responsibilities

Design safe and efficient flight paths for aircraft navigating complex, changing airspace.
Build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of autonomous aircraft routes.
Develop routing systems that balance reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale.
Account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand in routing systems.
Build and operate real-time, high-availability services with low latency, deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and robust fault tolerance.
Drive projects end-to-end and collaborate with autonomy and flight operations teams to power flight operations.