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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 flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles and makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
You will join the Application Software organization as a Senior Software Engineer on the ASW (Application Software) Launch Ops team. This is a greenfield, high-ownership individual contributor role focused on building the operational platform that enables Zipline to scale from tens of sites to hundreds or thousands globally.
Your core responsibilities include:
**Technical Ownership & Architecture**: Serve as technical owner for critical capabilities spanning site acquisition, permitting, infrastructure design, construction execution, deployment tracking, and launch readiness. Define APIs, data models, service boundaries, and architectural patterns with focus on maintainability, auditability, and observability.
**Operational Impact**: Replace fragmented manual workflows with a unified, auditable, automated system. Reduce manual coordination, shorten site-launch timelines, improve launch-date predictability, and provide cross-functional leaders with clear visibility into execution, dependencies, and risk.
**Complex Workflow Development**: Build durable operational workflows that handle long-running processes, government and vendor interactions, physical assets, documents and permits, approvals, dependencies, state transitions, and exception handling.
**System Integration**: Create a unified operational source of truth by building resilient integrations across ERP, GIS, document management, permitting, construction/project management, asset management, and internal operational systems.
**User-Centric Design**: Partner directly with users to translate fragmented processes into intuitive tools. Prototype workflows, validate them in real operating environments, and drive adoption.
**Production Excellence**: Build and operate business-critical services with meaningful health metrics, SLOs, observability, runbooks, and recovery mechanisms. Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response.
**Hands-On Delivery**: Ship production code, review critical changes, troubleshoot complex system behavior, and follow capabilities from discovery through deployment and operation.
**Cross-Functional Leadership**: Create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, identify systemic risks and dependencies, and drive alignment across technical and operational stakeholders without formal authority.
**Team Elevation**: Mentor peers, raise engineering standards, and strengthen practices in system design, automated testing, CI/CD, operational reliability, and pragmatic delivery.
You will work directly with Real Estate, Launch Operations, Construction, Hardware, Flight Operations, Commercial, and Manufacturing teams. Your work directly affects Zipline's ability to expand into new countries and reliably deliver time-critical supplies at scale.
The role can be based in South San Francisco or remote within the US. Regular travel is expected to work closely with stakeholders and understand operational challenges firsthand. Remote team members should expect more frequent travel—typically a few days at a time, potentially once per month.
**Requirements**:
- At least 5 years of professional experience developing and maintaining full-stack production systems at scale, or demonstrated equivalent technical mastery
- Product-minded engineering: understand user needs, identify root causes, design pragmatic solutions balancing business value, usability, technical simplicity, and long-term maintainability
- Systems perspective: break down ambiguous operational problems, collaborate with stakeholders to define solutions, deliver software that improves real-world processes
- Strong technical fundamentals: design maintainable systems, model data thoughtfully, create robust APIs, make sound tradeoffs across frontend, backend, distributed systems, and infrastructure
- Complex workflow experience: modeled long-running workflows, external dependencies, physical assets, complex state transitions with strong auditability, observability, and failure recovery
- Integration experience: built reliable integrations between internal and external/enterprise systems. Experience with ERP, GIS, document management, construction, permitting, or asset management systems is valuable but not required
- Modern technology mindset: comfortable learning and working across Python, Go, PostgreSQL, React, Kafka, gRPC, AWS, Grafana, and Honeycomb. Value engineers who learn new tools quickly over experience with every specific technology
- Effective use of AI: use AI thoughtfully throughout development lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, debugging, code review) while maintaining strong engineering judgment and quality
- Operational excellence: define meaningful service-health metrics and reliability goals, create actionable runbooks, participate in on-call rotations, drive improvements through incident reviews
- Quantifiable results: shipped high-impact capabilities that reduce manual intervention, shorten cycle times, increase predictability, improve throughput, or strengthen reliability—with concrete metrics
- Cross-functional leadership: communicate clearly under ambiguity, prioritize decisively, influence stakeholders across engineering and operational organizations without formal authority
- Owner's mindset: balance speed with correctness, understand real operational consequences of software used to deploy physical infrastructure and support safety-critical operations
