Senior/Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

14h•$180,000 - $240,000

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 a global autonomous logistics system, making millions of deliveries to date. Zipline's system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and saves people time. They operate at a global scale and are looking for problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. The Infrastructure team at Zipline builds and operates the software foundation for their global logistics network, owning platforms for deployment, observation, communication, and safe operation across cloud and physical environments. This role involves managing critical infrastructure like k8s clusters and server metal in OnPrem clusters, as Zipline builds infrastructure where software meets the physical world, with real consequences when systems fail.

Requirements

6+ years of professional experience designing, implementing and deploying cloud platforms to support internal and external business needs
Hands-on experience operating production systems, not just provisioning them.
Comfort working across the stack, from cloud APIs and Kubernetes controllers down to Linux, networking, storage, and runtime behavior.
A bias toward automation, software-defined infrastructure, and eliminating repeated human toil.
Sound judgment about when to use managed services, when to self-host, and when to build custom tooling.
Strong debugging instincts for distributed systems, especially under time pressure.
Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to build trust across software, hardware, operations, and business teams.
High standards for reliability, security, maintainability, and operational simplicity.
Grit, resourcefulness, and resilience in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.
Eligibility to work in the United States.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with AWS
Experience working with self-managed OnPrem servers
Experience with Kubernetes
Experience with event driven architectures (i.e. Kafka)

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate foundational infrastructure used by engineering teams across Zipline.
Own core platform capabilities across deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, networking, service-to-service communication, and runtime environments.
Operate and evolve Zipline-managed Kubernetes clusters, including cluster lifecycle, reliability, scalability, security, and developer ergonomics.
Build software and tooling that make infrastructure easier, safer, and faster for engineering teams to use.
Partner with product, robotics, autonomy, fleet management, data, and operations teams to understand their infrastructure needs and turn recurring pain into durable platform abstractions.
Improve the reliability and debuggability of distributed systems that span cloud services, physical infrastructure, and globally deployed operations.
Evaluate new technologies pragmatically, separating durable leverage from hype.
Participate in an on-call rotation for core infrastructure and improve the systems so on-call gets quieter over time.
Raise the technical bar through design reviews, operational reviews, documentation, mentoring, and interviews.