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Zipline is the world's largest autonomous drone delivery service, operating on four continents and completing millions of deliveries of blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. The company has safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles and makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
In this role, you will own C++ firmware and supporting tools critical to the safety and operation of Zipline's distributed aircraft systems. You'll design and build firmware for a network of microcontrollers and embedded Linux computers that execute flight and safety functions. Working alongside electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers, you'll transform hardware behavior and flight data into reliable, maintainable software for deployed aircraft operating in remote locations worldwide.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build C++ firmware for distributed aircraft microcontroller systems
- Develop reliable Ethernet, serial, and other microcontroller communication interfaces
- Define platform-level interfaces and reusable firmware components supporting multiple aircraft subsystems
- Own predictable and reliable performance across startup, real-time operation, fault handling, and recovery
- Optimize real-time behavior including CPU utilization, memory usage, scheduling latency, and timing jitter
- Develop metrics, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities for field deployment at scale
- Create Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test and validate firmware
You bring strong C++ embedded systems experience, expertise with embedded communications protocols (Ethernet, serial), and proven ability designing and debugging real-time firmware with task scheduling, interrupts, and concurrency. You have hands-on experience building and maintaining deployed embedded systems, handling edge cases for safety and reliability. You're fluent in implementing peripheral drivers from schematics and datasheets, with strong systems thinking and debugging intuition. The role is hybrid, centered in South San Francisco with regular in-office presence required.
