Routing Engine Architect for Real-Time Autonomy

Zipline; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline in San Francisco is seeking an engineer to join the Routing team, designing flight paths and optimization systems that determine how Zipline aircraft move globally. You will balance reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale, with real-time constraints and cross-functional collaboration with autonomy and flight operations teams.

The role emphasizes real-time, high-availability services, AI-assisted engineering, and a direct operational impact on live flights, ensuring fast,

Qualifications

• Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services.
• Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems.
• Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end.
• Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems; ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations.
• Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals.

Skills

Low-latency services

Path planning

Graph search

Motion planning

Ownership mindset

Backend fundamentals

Reliability engineering

Tools

Rust

Go

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

AWS

Job description

Zipline in San Francisco is seeking an engineer to join the Routing team, designing flight paths and optimization systems that determine how Zipline aircraft move globally. You will balance reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale, with real-time constraints and cross-functional collaboration with autonomy and flight operations teams.

The role emphasizes real-time, high-availability services, AI-assisted engineering, and a direct operational impact on live flights, ensuring fast,