Maps Intern (Spring 2027)

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 17,192,000 - 22,482,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline’s Maps Team internship in South San Francisco offers hands-on experience building the maps stack, including path planning services and data pipelines for routing and flight analytics.

You will contribute to multi-objective routing, data generation, and spatial data access while learning how theoretical path planning adapts to real-world challenges in a fast-growing startup. This in-person role runs Spring 2027 (Jan–Apr).

Qualifications

• Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills.
• Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization.
• Proficient coding and programming skills.
• Understanding of automated testing practices.
• Preferred experience with spatial data.
• Preferred experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research.

Responsibilities

• Work on services that generate routes and spatial planning artifacts.
• Use tools to visualize and evaluate geospatial features that impact serviceability.
• Work with teams to make spatial data accessible instantaneously anywhere in the world.
• Improve planning algorithms to make routing fast, safe, and reliable.

Skills

Analytical thinking

Algorithmic optimization

Coding / programming

Automated testing

Spatial data

Academic research experience

Education

Undergraduate year 2 complete

Job description

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.

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 autonomous delivery systems that enable fast, reliable, and sustainable delivery for businesses and consumers, transforming how goods move in everyday commerce. 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 services that generate routes and spatial planning artifacts
• Use tools to visualize and evaluate geospatial features that impact serviceability
• Work with teams to make spatial data accessible instantaneously anywhere in the world
• Improve planning algorithms to make routing fast, safe, and reliable

Examples of Previous Internship Projects

• 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

What You’ll Bring

• Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible
• Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills
• Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization
• Proficient coding and programming skills
• Understanding of automated testing practices
• Preferred experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research
• Preferred experience with spatial data

What Else You Should Know

This internship is a full-time position, in‑person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Spring 2027 interns from (January 2027 - April 2027).

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.

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.

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.