Software Engineer - Systems Validation

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

12h•$150,000 - $180,000•Onsite

About The Position

Zipline is seeking software engineers to develop the tools and infrastructure that support its systems validation and flight test organizations. This team is responsible for creating precise, efficient, and scalable software solutions to validate aircraft and ground systems at all levels. The work involves integrating real aircraft hardware, including avionics, sensors, actuators, and radios, with high-fidelity simulated environments in Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) setups. Additionally, the role includes building applications for planning, orchestrating, and evaluating thousands of automated nominal and off-nominal real-world flight tests daily. This position directly influences the speed, confidence, and quality of hardware and software development at Zipline. The successful candidate will gain a deep understanding of Zipline’s end-to-end logistics system, collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, and ensure the reliability of flight-ready software. The systems developed in this role will serve as the final defense before software and hardware are deployed globally for critical, real-world deliveries.

Requirements

4+ years of experience in software engineering for complex, hardware-backed, safety-critical systems.
Extensive experience in Python, specifically using test systems (e.g. pytest)
Experience testing Rust and/or C embedded systems.
Extensive experience working with CI/CD.
Experience developing and executing test plans for complex, safety critical, embedded and cloud software.
Strong problem-solving and ability to quickly learn a new system for testing purposes

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain HIL test infrastructure that integrates real aircraft hardware with simulated systems and environments.
Develop software tools, frameworks, and services to enable large-scale automated and semi-automated system validation.
Support a high-throughput flight test organization running thousands of daily tests, from targeted regression tests to rare off-nominal scenarios.
Write and maintain test software, drivers, and interfaces for embedded and Linux-based systems.
Support test framework architecture designs and improvements.
Debug complex validation failures spanning simulation, hardware, firmware, and application software
Collaborate with flight test engineers, systems engineers, avionics, autonomy and embedded software teams to define system-level validation strategies.
Improve test reliability, debuggability, and signal-to-noise as systems and test volume scale.