Staff Embedded Firmware Engineer — Real-Time Drone Systems

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Discretionary annual bonus

Sales incentives

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a software engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft MCUs. You will work with embedded Linux and real-time constraints to deliver reliable flight and safety software.

Join a hybrid team based in South San Francisco, collaborating with hardware, embedded, and systems engineers to turn hardware behavior into maintainable software for deployed aircraft. This role emphasizes observability, testing, and tooling, including Rust-based utilities and simulations

Qualifications

• Proven experience writing C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Experience with Ethernet, serial interfaces, or other hardware communication protocols.
• Experience designing and debugging real-time firmware with scheduling, interrupts, and memory constraints.
• Experience deploying real-world embedded systems with safety and reliability focus.
• Systems mindset for debugging and narrowing down issues.
• Ability to implement peripheral drivers from schematics and datasheets.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

C++ firmware

Embedded systems

Real-time firmware

Embedded networks

Peripheral drivers

Diagnostics & observability

Rust tooling

Tools

Rust tooling

Job description

Zipline is seeking a software engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft MCUs. You will work with embedded Linux and real-time constraints to deliver reliable flight and safety software.

Join a hybrid team based in South San Francisco, collaborating with hardware, embedded, and systems engineers to turn hardware behavior into maintainable software for deployed aircraft. This role emphasizes observability, testing, and tooling, including Rust-based utilities and simulations