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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 is redefining logistics and healthcare access globally.
As a Senior Embedded Software Validation Engineer on the avionics software team, you will lead validation strategy and execution for the flight computer and its related peripherals. Your role is critical to ensuring that avionics software executes reliably and deterministically in this safety-critical autonomous system.
Key responsibilities:
- Develop component-level validation strategy for software correctness, reliability, and performance on Embedded Linux nodes
- Design, implement, and execute nominal, stress, and edge-case scenarios from simulation through full-system flight testing
- Develop and maintain hardware test infrastructure to support validation objectives
- Build metrics, visualizations, real-time performance and safety monitors, and automated tools that reveal capability changes and regressions
- Set validation evidence and exit criteria that inform release, deployment, and operating-domain expansion decisions
- Debug failures across simulation, hardware, firmware, embedded software, and application software; document findings and escalate unresolved safety or performance risks
- Partner with test infrastructure teams to increase automated validation coverage, efficiency, and precision while maintaining rapid development velocity
Requirements:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science/Engineering, Software Engineering, or related field
- 5+ years of software development, software systems engineering, or software validation experience with robotic systems
- Strong experience in one or more of: Embedded Linux, PREEMPT_RT, firmware/RTOS, safety-critical systems, 802.11, Ethernet
- Experience developing validation strategies for autonomous robotics
- Experience root-causing failures in complex autonomous systems
- Proficiency with Rust or other safety-critical programming languages (MISRA C, C++)
- Familiarity with Python and SQL
- Experience deriving software safety or performance requirements from functional safety requirements or similar requirements decompositions
