Senior Software Engineer - Maps Routing

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Zipline, located in South San Francisco, is seeking an experienced engineer to design safe and efficient flight paths for our drone delivery aircraft. This role involves building optimization algorithms that compute global routes and collaborating with autonomy and flight operations teams to enhance delivery speed and reliability.

Applicants should have deep experience in production web applications and a strong understanding of low-latency service operation. Starting cash range is between $170,000 and $210,000, with potential equity and bonuses.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and maintaining production web applications.
• 3+ years of experience leading projects and mentoring engineers.
• Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services.

Responsibilities

• Design safe and efficient flight paths for Zipline aircraft.
• Build optimization algorithms for routing systems.
• Collaborate with autonomy and flight operations teams.

Skills

Production web applications

Low-latency services

Path planning

Graph search

Distributed systems engineering

Tools

Rust

Go

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

AWS

Job description

About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About You and the Role

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.

Why this Role is Unique

• 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.

What You'll Bring

We care far more about how you approach problems than experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates typically have:

• 8+ years of experience building and maintaining production web applications
• 3+ years of experience leading projects, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring other engineers
• 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

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 problems.

We 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 quality.

What Else You Need to Know

This role is an in office role based out of our South San Francisco HQ. The starting cash range for this role is $170,000 - $210,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.