Staff Software Engineer - Routing Engine

Zipline•Ann Arbor, CA

About The Position

Zipline is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Routing team, which determines how Zipline aircraft move through the world. The engineer will design safe and efficient flight paths for aircraft navigating complex and changing airspace, including obstacles, uncertainty, weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand. The role also involves building optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by aircraft, balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. This is a highly visible, safety-critical role with direct operational impact. Routing systems operate in real time and must provide low latency, deterministic behavior, strong service-level agreements, high availability, and robust fault tolerance. The work combines algorithmic problem-solving with production systems at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. The engineer will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to build systems that power live flight operations. Zipline uses AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows to increase engineering velocity while maintaining rigor in system design and code quality. Its current technology stack includes Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, though experience with specific technologies is not required and the company values the ability to learn quickly.

Requirements

Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services.
Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems.
An ownership mindset and a track record of 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.

Nice To Haves

Experience with technologies in Zipline’s current stack, including Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS; specific technology experience is not required.
Experience using modern AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

Design safe and efficient flight paths for aircraft operating in complex, changing airspace.
Build optimization algorithms to compute global sets of autonomous aircraft routes.
Balance route reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale while accounting for operational constraints and dynamic conditions.
Build and operate real-time, low-latency, high-availability routing services with deterministic behavior 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 apply modern AI-assisted engineering workflows while maintaining strong system design and code quality.