Senior Software Engineer - Field Systems

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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 YOU AND THE ROLE

Are you eager to apply your technical skills to solve real-world problems and drive meaningful change? Do you thrive in environments where you're given ownership, creative freedom, and complex challenges to tackle? If so, join our Field Systems Engineering team at Zipline—where your work directly impacts lives every day.

Zipline’s long-range drone platform began operations in Rwanda in 2016. With a fixed-wing design capable of flying over 200 km on a single charge, our drones enable fast, reliable delivery of critical medical supplies to remote communities. From helping new mothers in Rwanda to saving snake bite victims in Ghana, Zipline’s technology has already served millions across the African continent—delivering thousands of life-saving products daily.

The Field Systems Engineering (FSE) team operates at the intersection of Engineering and Operations. We ensure that the equipment we design is safe, robust, and reliable—because lives depend on it. As a Field Systems Engineer focused on Software, you’ll play a crucial role in optimizing the performance and reliability of our long-range drone systems.

In this role, you’ll work closely with a range of cross-functional engineers and flight operators to identify friction points in how our software supports daily operations for our Platform 1 vehicle that is supporting operations around the world. You’ll lead anomaly investigations, define data-driven requirements, and drive execution of improvement projects to enhance system reliability, ease of maintenance, and overall usability. Whether you're implementing direct software improvements or coordinating efforts across multiple teams, your goal is to ensure the platform runs smoothly and efficiently. At times, you’ll step into a technical program management role—helping unblock other engineers, align priorities, and drive key projects forward. Success in this role requires an entrepreneurial mindset, strong technical foundation, excellent communication skills, and the ability to translate between the needs of operators in the field and the engineers building the system. If you thrive at the intersection of software and real-world impact, and enjoy bringing clarity and progress to complex systems, you’ll feel right at home here.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Optimize and improve a complex, real-world system used daily by operators—delivering timely solutions while ensuring all changes are thoroughly validated for safety and reliability.
• Travel to our international operations centers to understand how the system works in the real world.
• Become the go-to expert on the existing flight software stack, along with its development, testing, and deployment tools.
• Support triage and risk assessment of emergent technical issues, balancing urgency with sound engineering judgment.
• Lead new projects to drive operations efficiency and increase system robustness.
• Drive data-driven analysis of system behavior using tools like Databricks to diagnose issues, evaluate performance, and quantify the impact of improvements.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships across the organization—from operations and systems engineering to software leads and regulatory partners.
• Identify, document, and drive improvements to the software development and deployment lifecycle for the long-range drone platform.
• Collaborate across teams—global operations, engineering, and leadership—to shape the strategic software roadmap for the platform.
• Design, coordinate, and execute high-impact testing campaigns that validate new features, improvements, or fixes in real-world conditions.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

Basic qualifications:

• 8+ years of professional experience in embedded software development, integration & test, mechatronics/robotics engineering, or similar, for hardware products in a safety-critical field, e.g. aerospace, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles.
• Proficiency in one or more “strongly typed” language: Rust, C++, C
• Familiarity with software development practices, including version control (e.g. Git), testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to analyze field performance data, and develop data analysis tools in languages like Python, SQL, MATLAB
• You are willing to work some nights/weekends and travel, including to international sites as needed
• You are eligible to work in the US

Preferred qualifications:

• Demonstrable history of assuming ownership of complex engineering problems, and driving them from inception to solution.
• Experience leading engineering projects with multi-disciplinary teams to solve technical problems in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Demonstrated engineering intuition, ability to think critically, and be comfortable with ambiguity.
• Creative problem solver that can make design and development decisions with limited or imperfect data.
• Strong sense of accountability and integrity, and are not afraid to challenge the status quo.
• Self-motivated with strong learning, multi-tasking, organizational, and documentation skills.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

This role is anin-office opportunity based out of our South San Francisco HQ.

The starting cash range for this role is $160,000-200,000. 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, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

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!