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Salary: USD 220,000 - 250,000 / annual
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 global logistics and healthcare access.
In this Staff-level embedded firmware role, you will own critical C++ firmware and supporting tools for Zipline's distributed aircraft microcontroller systems. You'll work on firmware that executes safety-critical flight functions across a network of microcontrollers and embedded Linux computers, designed to operate reliably in remote field locations with limited network connectivity.
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, timing jitter, and resource contention
- Develop metrics, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities for field deployment at scale
- Build Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test and validate firmware
You'll collaborate with electrical, mechanical, embedded Linux, and systems engineers to turn hardware behavior and flight data into reliable, maintainable software for deployed aircraft.
This is a hybrid role centered in South San Francisco headquarters with regular in-office presence required.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong software engineering skills and production experience writing C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems
- Experience with embedded communications (Ethernet, serial interfaces, or other hardware communication protocols)
- Experience designing and debugging real-time firmware, including task scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, synchronization, and memory constraints
- Experience building and maintaining real-world deployed embedded systems, handling edge cases to ensure safety, reliability, and high performance
- Systems mindset and strong debugging intuition
- Fluency implementing peripheral drivers based on electrical schematics and datasheets, and debugging at the hardware-software boundary
- Ability to work from the office on a regular basis
