Maps Intern (Summer 2026)

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About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About the Maps Team

Zipline builds and operates fleets of delivery drones to get medicine to those who need it, fast, regardless of where they live. To power this, the Maps Team is building out the long term scalable solutions that enable us to fly in new countries and regions as rapidly as possible. This team is responsible for building tools and services that produce artifacts used by our vehicles to fly their missions in the real world. This means the outputs from the Maps Team define the places our vehicles will fly in the world, their constraints, and provide strong priors for the real-time system on the vehicle to follow to accomplish its mission safely.

The Role

In this role you will contribute to, build, and own portions of Zipline’s Maps stack. That includes contributing to an extensible path planning service used for generating routes that are operationally flown every day. It also includes a suite of services for data generation, transformation and access for path planning and flight data analytics. Your work within the team could range from path planning algorithms, validation of artifacts for compliance with flight requirements, to spatial data generation and data transformation pipelines. Your work will help us achieve multi-objective routing and efficient spatial data ingestion and access, enabling Zipline to serve more customers around the world. From this internship, you can expect to learn about how theoretical path planning algorithms are adapted for a real world problem, and how data and spatial search interact to enable routing in air. Our ideal candidate works well in startup environments, is comfortable wearing many hats, and is excited to learn about many aspects of how Zipline’s spatial planning works today.

What You'll Do

• Work on containerized services that generate spatial planning artifacts
• Use GeoData tools to visualize and evaluate land features that impact serviceability
• Work with teams to make spatial data accessible instantaneously anywhere in the world
• Improve planning algorithms to make routing fast and reliable
• Build systems for geoindexing and geo-accessing spatial constraints instantaneously
• Adapt current spatial planning to different costs and models and build the infrastructure to enable cost-based search.

Examples of previous internship projects include:

• Prototyping a new path planning algorithm to enhance long-range routes
• Incorporating a multidimensional risk data into the routing engine
• Creating tooling for generating composite Digital Elevation Models
• Building infrastructure to enable our zips to survey large areas for terrain and imagery updates

What You'll Bring

• Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible.
• Proficient coding skills in Python, with an openness to bring new ideas and languages to the table
• Ability to write clean, modular code with accompanying documentation
• Understanding of automated testing practices and the ability to apply them to produce solid code that can be iterated on quickly
• Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization techniques (especially where applied to robotics motion planning)
• Preferred onsite in South San Francisco
• Preferred experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research
• Preferred experience with spatial data

What Else You Should Know

Our internships are full-time positions, in-person at our South San Francisco or Dallas office. We will host our Summer 2026 interns from May or June to August.

Candidates are limited to three (3) applications within a 30-day period.**

The starting cash range for this internship is $40 - 44/ hour. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, and working location. The total compensation package for each role may also include: a housing stipend; overtime pay; relocation support; paid sick time; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

Zipline is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your point of contact at Zipline know if you require any accommodations throughout your interview process.