Software Engineer - Embedded Firmware
About The Position
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, aiming to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere. They design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, making deliveries critical supplies quickly and reliably. Zipline operates on four continents, making a delivery every 30 seconds and completing millions of deliveries to date. Their system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back, with over 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown. The company is looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and scaling the future of logistics. They seek individuals who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can achieve the impossible at record speeds. As an embedded firmware engineer at Zipline, you will be responsible for building the lowest level and most safety-critical software on their aircraft. You will collaborate closely with electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers to ensure each aircraft seamlessly transitions from manufacturing to participation in the largest drone delivery network globally. The role involves using C++ for firmware development, with Rust and Python for tooling deployed to production systems. The aircraft are deployed globally, often to locations that are not easily accessible, even over a network. This role will contribute to building re-usable firmware infrastructure to enhance system observability and reliability without requiring a proportional increase in the engineering team size.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering skills, with proficiency in at least one strongly typed language (C++, Rust, and Python)
- Curiosity and a willingness to learn and work in a variety of embedded environments, from running on bare metal, to using an RTOS and integrating with embedded Linux
- Experience building and maintaining real-world deployed embedded systems, and handling the long tail of edge cases to ensure consistent safety, reliability and high performance
- A systems mindset and intuition for debugging; when anything could be wrong, you know how to narrow down the possibilities
- Fluency in implementing peripheral drivers based on electrical schematics and datasheets, and debugging at this boundary in order to support prototype hardware evaluation
Responsibilities
- Design and build the software necessary to run critical flight and safety processes on a network of microcontrollers, in cooperation with embedded Linux edge computers
- Understand and improve the reliability of the flight software system as a whole, working with hardware and systems engineers to develop comprehensive fault management strategies and hardware-in-the-loop tests
- Analyze the runtime characteristics of our avionics software in flight to build confidence in its performance, focusing on re-usable, maintainable software and optimizing where required
- Develop metrics, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to prepare the system for field deployment at scale
- Design and build data collection and testing tools to support early stage evaluation of new sensors, communications systems, and microcontroller platforms
Benefits
- equity compensation
- discretionary annual or performance bonuses
- sales incentives
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- paid time off
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
