Staff Software Engineer – Integrations Platform

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

7h•$180,000 - $270,000

About The Position

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, focused on serving all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine, and essential goods anytime, anywhere. They operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, making deliveries globally. The company is seeking practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth, motivated by building systems with a direct, meaningful impact. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a hands-on individual contributor responsible for the technical direction of Zipline’s integrations platform. You will define the architecture and roadmap, build production software, and empower engineers to create partner API integrations. This includes developing frontend and backend SDKs, reusable connector patterns, development environments, and automated quality checks to enable partners and engineering teams to build reliable integrations independently. Initial applications will focus on POS and order-aggregation connectors, menu synchronization, and merchant workflows. Your work will be crucial in unlocking enterprise deals by simplifying Zipline integration and enabling reliable delivery experiences at scale, combining hands-on engineering with architectural and technical leadership to accelerate the path from partnership to production and support Zipline’s commercial growth.

Requirements

7+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with demonstrated ownership of architecture and delivery across services and teams.
Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling used by other engineers to ship production software, ideally for external API integrations.
Strong skills in API design, data modeling, asynchronous workflows, schema evolution, eventual consistency, and idempotent processing.
Ability to turn varied external APIs into reusable connector patterns with clear boundaries and testable contracts, including experience with automated integration testing and development environments.
Demonstrated production ownership, including observability, on-call support, incident investigation, and improvements that prevent recurring failures.
Deep proficiency in Go, Python, or a comparable backend language, with experience building libraries, command-line tools, or developer workflows.
Experience building or supporting frontend libraries, SDKs, or embedded customer experiences.
Ability to define architecture and engineering standards across distributed engineering teams, enable independent execution through documentation and technical review, and align Product, Commercial, Finance, and Operations around platform priorities.
Ability to communicate clearly with external engineering teams, turn ambiguous business needs into practical technical plans, and balance enterprise launch commitments with reusable platform investments.
Experience using AI tools to improve implementation, testing, debugging, and review while taking responsibility for correctness, security, and maintainability.

Responsibilities

Enable partner experiences by building frontend and backend SDKs, integration frameworks, connector templates, and developer tooling.
Set the platform architecture by defining clear interfaces, establishing API and SDK versioning, and ensuring consistency in order lifecycle, authentication, authorization, data mapping, and monitoring.
Make development self-service through the creation of sandbox environments, partner API simulators, and automated contract tests.
Make launches repeatable by establishing integration acceptance criteria and automated release checks.
Simplify onboarding with documentation, reference implementations, and onboarding workflows.
Keep integrations reliable by establishing consistent retry, idempotency, and fallback behavior, defining service reliability goals, and owning monitoring, runbooks, incident response, and remediation.
Build for lasting scale by evolving data models and making architecture decisions that reduce partner-specific workarounds.
Multiply engineering impact by leading technical reviews, mentoring engineers, and using recurring issues to improve the framework.
Guide enterprise launches by working with partner engineers, Product, and Commercial to translate requirements into a platform roadmap, resolve technical blockers, and shorten the path from deal signing to production launch.