Senior Autonomy Validation Engineer: Large-Scale Simulation

Zipline; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system and seeks a deeply technical software engineer for the Autonomy Validation team in San Francisco. You will own the validation infrastructure across planning, perception, and control, building simulation tools and scalable testing workflows for real-world conditions.

You’ll craft internal platforms for validation that enable simulation at scale, rigorous scenario testing, and automated analysis, directly shaping how autonomy

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building or working with simulation systems for robotics or autonomous systems, particularly for testing or validation.
• Experience building tools, platforms, or infrastructure used by other engineers.
• Understanding of validation methodologies, including defining metrics and evaluating system behavior.
• Exposure to autonomy stacks (planning, perception, control) and safety-critical domains.

Responsibilities

• Build and own infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
• Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large-scale, high-fidelity testing.
• Develop custom validation tools that plug into internal autonomy development stack.
• Create scalable, reliable, automated solutions for running thousands of validation tasks and tracking results.

Skills

C/C++/Rust

Python

Simulation software

Robotics

Autonomy validation

Testing infrastructure

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

AWS

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system and seeks a deeply technical software engineer for the Autonomy Validation team in San Francisco. You will own the validation infrastructure across planning, perception, and control, building simulation tools and scalable testing workflows for real-world conditions.

You’ll craft internal platforms for validation that enable simulation at scale, rigorous scenario testing, and automated analysis, directly shaping how autonomy