Senior Software Engineer (Maps Routing)

Zipline; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a routing engineer to design and implement flight paths that move Zipline aircraft safely through changing airspace. You will optimize global routes, balancing reliability, throughput, and performance while operating in real time and at scale.

You will work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations, collaborating with autonomy and flight operations teams to power the routing network and improve delivery speed and reliability.

Qualifications

• Experience in path planning or motion planning.
• Strong background in optimization for real-time systems.
• Backend or distributed systems fundamentals.
• Ability to work across autonomy and operations teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement safe, low-latency flight paths in real time.
• Build optimization algorithms for global routing.
• Maintain high-availability services with strong SLAs.
• Collaborate with autonomy and flight operations teams.
• Power the routing brain of the delivery network at scale.

Skills

Path planning

Graph search

Motion planning

Optimization

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Low-latency engineering

Tools

Rust

Go

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

AWS

Job description

• The Routing team determines how every Zipline aircraft moves through the world. You will design safe and efficient flight paths that guide Zips through complex, ever-changing airspace - navigating obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time, with your work showing up in live flights every day
• You will build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips - balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. These systems operate in real time and must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand
• This is a highly visible, safety-critical function with direct operational impact. The systems you build determine how fast we deliver, how efficiently we scale, and how safely we operate in increasingly complex environments
• Engineers on this team work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations
• Build the brain of the delivery network. You’ll design systems that determine how aircraft move through real-world airspace at global scale
• Real-world impact. Every improvement you make shows up in delivery speed, network throughput, and how reliably we operate
• Deep technical challenges. Routing sits at the intersection of optimization, distributed systems, real-time decision-making, and high-reliability infrastructure
• Real-time, high-availability services. Routing is a high-visibility service: low latency, deterministic behavior, strong SLAs, and robust fault-tolerance matter
• AI-accelerated engineering. We leverage modern AI and agentic workflows to increase engineering velocity while maintaining strong system rigor
• This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy combining algorithmic problem-solving with building high-reliability production systems that operate in the real world

Strong candidates typically have:

Our current stack includes technologies such as Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, but we value engineers who can learn quickly and focus on solving the right problemsWe also lean heavily into AI-assisted engineering workflows and expect engineers to use modern tools to amplify productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code qualityAbility to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operationsExperience operating low-latency, high-availability production servicesComfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problemsStrong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentalsHands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problemsExtreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end