Senior Autonomous Flight Motion Planning Engineer

Zipline; Ann Arbor (MI); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous logistics company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to advance real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight in the US market, including dense metros.

You’ll tackle planning across safety, energy, time and reliability, work with perception and controls teams, and validate software through SIL/HIL, sim, and field tests to enable reliable deliveries at scale.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 3+ years building software for safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics).
• Strong in Rust/C/C++ for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux.
• Depth in planning & search (A*, RRT*, etc.) and trajectory optimization.
• Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay and validation.
• Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy in noisy, real-world conditions.

Responsibilities

• Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight.
• Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability.
• Plan in uncertain environments with wind, sensors, and partial observability.
• Design safety-critical software for obstacle avoidance and human interfaces.
• Extend autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads with clean interfaces.
• Prove it before flight via large-scale sim, SIL/HIL, log replay, fault-injection.
• Mine fleet data to validate safety metrics and improve models.

Skills

3+ years experience in safety-critical

Rust/C/C++

embedded/Linux

planning & search

SIL/HIL & sim validation

development for autonomous systems

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous logistics company, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to advance real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight in the US market, including dense metros.

You’ll tackle planning across safety, energy, time and reliability, work with perception and controls teams, and validate software through SIL/HIL, sim, and field tests to enable reliable deliveries at scale.