Zipline is a global drone delivery service that operates an autonomous logistics system delivering food, medicine, and essential goods. The Senior Software Engineer will build and own an operational platform supporting site acquisition, permitting, infrastructure design, construction, deployment tracking, and launch readiness while replacing fragmented manual workflows with scalable, auditable software. The role includes designing APIs and architectures, building integrations and workflows, operating business-critical services, and leading cross-functional technical initiatives.

Responsibilities:

Drive core product domains. Serve as a technical owner for critical capabilities across site acquisition, permitting, infrastructure design, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness—ensuring their long-term technical health and strategic direction
Deliver measurable impact. Reduce manual coordination, shorten site-launch timelines, improve launch-date predictability, and give cross-functional leaders clear visibility into execution, dependencies, and risk
Lead technical design. Define the APIs, data models, service boundaries, and architectural patterns that power the platform, with a focus on maintainability, auditability, observability, and pragmatic evolution
Build durable operational workflows. Translate complex real-world processes into software that supports long-running workflows, government and vendor interactions, physical assets, documents and permits, approvals, dependencies, state transitions, and exception handling
Create a unified operational source of truth. Build resilient integrations across ERP, GIS, document management, permitting, construction and project management, asset management, and internal operational systems
Design for the people doing the work. Partner directly with users to turn fragmented processes and data into intuitive tools for planning and execution. Prototype workflows, validate them in real operating environments, and drive adoption
Own production excellence. Build and operate business-critical services with meaningful health metrics, SLOs, observability, runbooks, and recovery mechanisms. Participate in on-call, lead incident response when needed, and improve systems through thoughtful postmortems
Remain deeply hands-on. Ship production code, review critical changes, troubleshoot complex system behavior, and follow major capabilities from discovery through deployment and operation
Lead through influence. Create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, identify systemic risks and cross-team dependencies, and drive alignment across technical and operational stakeholders
Elevate the team. Mentor peers, raise engineering standards, and strengthen practices in system design, automated testing, CI/CD, operational reliability, and pragmatic delivery

Requirements:

At least 5 years of professional experience developing and maintaining full-stack production systems at scale, or demonstrated equivalent technical mastery
You understand user needs, identify root causes, and design pragmatic solutions that balance business value, usability, technical simplicity, and long-term maintainability
You can break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define the right solution, and deliver software that improves real-world processes
You design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, create robust APIs, and make sound tradeoffs across frontend applications, backend services, distributed systems, and infrastructure
You have modeled long-running workflows, external dependencies, physical assets, and complex state transitions with strong auditability, observability, and failure recovery
You have built reliable integrations between internal services and external or enterprise systems
You are comfortable learning and working across technologies such as Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb
We value engineers who learn new tools quickly over experience with every specific technology
You use AI thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle—including design, implementation, testing, debugging, and code review—while maintaining strong engineering judgment and quality
You define meaningful service-health metrics and reliability goals, create actionable runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements through incident reviews
You have shipped high-impact capabilities that reduce manual intervention, shorten cycle times, increase predictability, improve throughput, or strengthen reliability—and can demonstrate the results with concrete metrics
You communicate clearly under ambiguity, prioritize decisively, and influence stakeholders across engineering and operational organizations without relying on formal authority
You balance speed with correctness and understand the real operational consequences of software used to deploy physical infrastructure and support safety-critical operations
This role can be based in South San Francisco or remotely within the United States
Regular travel is expected so that you can work closely with stakeholders, understand operational challenges firsthand, and build software grounded in real-world workflows
Travel may include visits to Zipline headquarters, operating sites, and new-market launches
Remote team members should expect more frequent travel—typically a few days at a time, potentially once per month
Experience with ERP, GIS, document management, construction, permitting, or asset management systems is valuable but not required

Software Engineer V (Senior C++ / Distributed Systems)

Key skills

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