Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

8d•$150,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve all humans equally by providing access to essential goods. They design, build, and operate an autonomous logistics system for critical supplies, operating on four continents and completing millions of deliveries. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. Zipline is seeking practical problem solvers motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact and scaling the future of logistics. They are looking for individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record speeds. As a Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer, you will lead the end-to-end software evaluation of Zipline’s autonomous drone delivery system, covering domains such as sensor drivers, perception, navigation, guidance and control, motion planning, power management, and actuator control. You will develop tools, metrics, and visualizations to highlight capability improvements, gaps, and regressions, thereby accelerating engineering decision-making for large-scale deployments and operating domain expansion. Your responsibilities may extend to aircraft performance, delivery operations, docking systems, and fleet orchestration. You will also evaluate and enhance validation practices, identifying opportunities to improve tools, methodologies, and processes to increase validation coverage, efficiency, and precision while maintaining high development and deployment velocity. This role requires close collaboration with embedded and autonomy software teams, systems engineering, the data platform, and test infrastructure teams to ensure software functions as intended in real-world scenarios, acting as a bridge between Systems Engineering and Software Development at Zipline.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field.
5+ years of Software Development, Software Systems Engineering or Software Validation experience working with robotic systems.
Deeper experience in at least 1 of the following: Perception, Motion Planning, Navigation, Control or Estimation & Dynamics.
Experience developing nominal, adversarial, stress and edge case testing for robotics applications.
Experience working with large data sets in production pipelines.
Experience root causing failures in complex, autonomous, robotic systems.
Proficiency in scripting (python, sql) and programming languages for safety critical applications (MISRA C, Rust, C++).

Nice To Haves

Experience with risk assessment tools and techniques (STPA, HARA).
Experience with standards DO-178C, ISO26262, ISO 21448, ARP 4761, ARP 4754.
Background in reliability engineering / statistical validation techniques.
Experience building software safety and software performance requirements from functional / technical requirements.

Responsibilities

Validate system requirements and contribute to the iteration of software requirements.
Collaborate with systems engineers and software teams to define system-level validation strategies.
Design, implement, and execute test scenarios for Zipline’s end-to-end autonomous drone delivery software stack from simulation to full system (flight) test.
Lead software systems validation strategy, focused on system-level performance, reliability, and safety.
Build software performance and safety monitors that operate reliably in real-time systems.
Collaborate with test infrastructure and data platform teams to architect and build frameworks and tools that enable large-scale automated system validation.
Debug complex validation failures spanning simulation, hardware, firmware, embedded software and application software.