Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer to lead end-to-end evaluation from simulation to full-flight testing of its autonomous drone delivery system.

You will bridge Systems Engineering and Software Development, owning validation strategy and evidence that exposes capability gains, gaps, regressions, and safety risks across aircraft performance, delivery operations, docking systems, and fleet orchestration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of software development, software systems engineering, or software validation experience with robotic systems.
• Strong experience in embedded Linux, perception, motion planning, navigation, control, estimation, dynamics, connected systems, or power management.
• Experience developing validation for autonomous robotics (nominal, adversarial, stress, edge-case).
• Experience root-causing failures in complex autonomous systems and working with large datasets in production pipelines.
• Proficiency with Python and SQL, plus programming languages used in safety-critical applications (MISRA C, Rust, C++).
• Experience applying risk-assessment tools and deriving software safety or performance requirements.

Responsibilities

• Define system-level validation strategy for software performance, reliability, and safety.
• Design, implement, and execute validation scenarios from simulation through full-system flight testing.
• Build metrics, visualizations, and automated tools revealing capability changes and regressions.
• Set validation exit criteria informing release, deployment, and operating-domain expansion decisions.
• Debug failures across simulation, hardware, firmware, embedded software, and application software; document findings clearly.
• Collaborate with test infrastructure and data platform teams to increase automated validation coverage and velocity.

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field

Tools

Python

SQL

MISRA C

Rust

C++

Job description

Zipline is seeking a Senior Software Systems Validation Engineer to lead end-to-end evaluation from simulation to full-flight testing of its autonomous drone delivery system.

You will bridge Systems Engineering and Software Development, owning validation strategy and evidence that exposes capability gains, gaps, regressions, and safety risks across aircraft performance, delivery operations, docking systems, and fleet orchestration.