Senior full-stack engineer building Zipline's operational platform for drone delivery site launch, covering permitting, infrastructure design, construction, and deployment tracking. High-ownership role establishing technical foundations for scaling from tens to thousands of sites. Stack includes full-stack production systems, workflow engines, ERP/GIS integrations, and operational reliability.
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
Joining Zipline as a Senior Software Engineer on the ASW Launch Ops team, you will be part of the Application Software organization. You will build the operational platform that turns a new market from an idea into a live, revenue-generating network—covering site acquisition, infrastructure design, permitting, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness.
This is a greenfield, high-ownership individual contributor role. You will help establish the technical foundations for a platform intended to scale Zipline from tens of sites to hundreds or thousands. Working directly with Real Estate, Launch Operations, Construction, Hardware, Flight Operations, Commercial, and Manufacturing, you will replace fragmented manual workflows with a unified, auditable, and automated operational system. Your work will directly affect Zipline’s ability to expand into new countries and reliably deliver time-critical supplies at scale.
What You'll Do
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.
What You'll Bring
Senior individual contribution. At least 5 years of professional experience developing and maintaining full-stack production systems at scale, or demonstrated equivalent technical mastery.
Product-minded engineering. You understand user needs, identify root causes, and design pragmatic solutions that balance business value, usability, technical simplicity, and long-term maintainability.
Systems perspective. You can break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define the right solution, and deliver software that improves real-world processes.
Strong technical fundamentals. You design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, create robust APIs, and make sound tradeoffs across frontend applications, backend services, distributed systems, and infrastructure.
Complex workflow experience. You have modeled long-running workflows, external dependencies, physical assets, and complex state transitions with strong auditability, observability, and failure recovery.
Integration experience. You have built reliable integrations between internal services and external or enterprise systems. Experience with ERP, GIS, document management, construction, permitting, or asset management systems is valuable but not required.
Modern technology mindset. 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.
Effective use of AI. You use AI thoughtfully throughout the development lifecycle—including design, implementation, testing, debugging, and code review—while maintaining strong engineering judgment and quality.
Operational excellence. You define meaningful service-health metrics and reliability goals, create actionable runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, and drive improvements through incident reviews.
Quantifiable results. 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.
Cross-functional leadership. You communicate clearly under ambiguity, prioritize decisively, and influence stakeholders across engineering and operational organizations without relying on formal authority.
Owner’s mindset. You balance speed with correctness and understand the real operational consequences of software used to deploy physical infrastructure and support safety-critical operations.
Assuming this position, you will take meaningful ownership of a business-critical operational platform from day one. Your mandate is to deliver quantifiable improvements in launch velocity, predictability, execution visibility, and system reliability while building foundations capable of supporting Zipline’s continued global expansion.
What Else You Need To Know
The starting cash range for this role is $150,000-$230,000. 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; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.
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.
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!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.
