Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer: Real-Time Drone Systems

Candidate; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline in San Francisco seeks an experienced firmware engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed drone system. You will collaborate with electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers to turn hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software deployed on aircraft.

The role emphasizes real-time performance and observability for safety-critical field deployments. This hybrid role requires regular presence at our South San Francisco headquarters and offers career growth

Qualifications

• C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Embedded communications interfaces such as Ethernet, serial, or other protocols.
• Real-time firmware design and debugging: scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, memory constraints.
• Experience deploying embedded systems and handling edge cases for safety and reliability.
• Systems mindset for debugging and narrowing down issues.
• Peripheral drivers based on schematics and datasheets.

Responsibilities

• Design and build C++ firmware for a distributed system of aircraft microcontrollers.
• Develop reliable Ethernet, serial, and other microcontroller communication interfaces.
• Define platform-level interfaces and reusable firmware components for multiple subsystems.
• Own predictable and reliable performance of MCU systems and buses across startup, RT operation, fault handling and recovery.
• Optimize real-time behavior: CPU utilization, memory usage, scheduling latency, timing jitter, resource contention.
• Develop metrics, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for field deployment at scale.
• Develop Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test firmware behavior.

Skills

C++ embedded

Embedded systems

Real-time firmware

Hardware interfacing

Rust tooling

Tools

Ethernet/Serial interfaces

Job description

Zipline in San Francisco seeks an experienced firmware engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed drone system. You will collaborate with electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers to turn hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software deployed on aircraft.

The role emphasizes real-time performance and observability for safety-critical field deployments. This hybrid role requires regular presence at our South San Francisco headquarters and offers career growth