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.
Zipline operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system (ground or air) — and in the coming year, we will be hyper-scaling from thousands to tens of thousands of carefully coordinated drone deliveries in several dense, dynamic U.S. metros. Our Autonomy Motion Planning team is looking for a Senior Software Engineer who is passionate about developing autonomous systems for the real world. This role will explore cutting-edge approaches to decision making and trajectory planning that will enable more accurate and timely deliveries, putting you in the position to make critical product decisions that will shape our future architectures.
Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability—balancing mission goals with vehicle constraints.
Plan in uncertain environments with complex dynamics: robustness to wind/turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.
Design safety-critical software for avoiding obstacles and interfacing with humans while delivering and picking up packages
Extend the autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads; define clean interfaces with perception and controls.
Prove it before flight: large-scale sim, SIL/HIL, log replay, and fault-injection.
Mine real fleet data to validate safety metrics, improve models, and burn down long-tail failure modes.
Strong in Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.
Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation.
Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy conditions—owning the last mile to reliability.
Systems thinker who collaborates tightly with perception, controls, and flight ops; crisp docs and design reviews.
Impact at scale: Your planner won’t benchmark in isolation—it will fly thousands of missions/day delivering essential goods.
Technical frontier: Real-time multi-agent autonomy, joint optimization, and robustness under uncertainty at a scale few have seen.
Ownership: High-leverage IC role—your decisions shape Zipline’s flight stack and the behavior of a global fleet.
Category leadership: Help define the standard for safe, reliable autonomous flight in the real world.
Zipline was founded to create the first logistics system that serves all humans equally. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges. Leveraging expertise in robotics and autonomy, Zipline designs, manufactures and operates the world’s largest automated delivery system. Zipline serves tens of millions of people around the world and is making good on the promise of building an equitable and more resilient global supply chain.
From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart and enabling leading healthcare providers to bring care into the home in the United States, Zipline is transforming the way goods move. By transitioning to clean, electric, instant logistics, we can decarbonize delivery, decrease road congestion, and reduce fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access for billions of people. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Zipline is inspiring people, governments, and businesses to imagine what is possible when goods can move as seamlessly as information.
To join the team, check out our career page: https://flyzipline.com/careers/
