Staff Software Engineer - Routing Engine

Zipline•South San Francisco, CA

1d•$220,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Zipline is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Routing team, which determines how its aircraft move through the world. The engineer will design safe and efficient flight paths for autonomous aircraft operating in complex, changing airspace, accounting for obstacles, uncertainty, weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand. The role involves building optimization algorithms and real-time systems that compute the global set of routes used by Zipline aircraft. These safety-critical systems must balance reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale, with low latency, deterministic behavior, strong service-level agreements, high availability, and robust fault tolerance. The work directly affects delivery speed, network throughput, and operational safety. The engineer will work across autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations, collaborating closely with autonomy and flight operations teams. Zipline’s current technology stack includes Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS. The team also uses AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows to increase productivity while maintaining strong standards for system design and code quality. The starting cash range is $220,000–$260,000. Final cash compensation depends on factors including experience, qualifications, skills, work location, and projected impact. Total compensation may also include equity, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, medical, dental, and vision insurance, paid time off, and other benefits. The role may be hired at one of three levels depending on the candidate’s experience, skills, and demonstrated scope. Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from people traditionally underrepresented in technology.

Requirements

Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services.
Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems.
Track record of taking extreme ownership and driving projects end-to-end.
Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility, high-impact problems.
Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams, including autonomy and operations.
Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals.
Ability to learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems.
Ability to use modern AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality.

Responsibilities

Design safe and efficient flight paths for autonomous aircraft operating in complex and changing airspace.
Build optimization algorithms that compute aircraft routes across the global delivery network.
Develop real-time systems that account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand.
Build high-availability, low-latency routing services with deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and robust fault tolerance.
Collaborate with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that power flight operations.
Drive projects end-to-end and improve delivery speed, network throughput, reliability, and safety.