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Salary: USD 210,000 - 260,000 / 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.
The Embedded Platform team builds middleware and infrastructure for the flight software stack running on embedded Linux systems in autonomous aircraft. These systems must communicate reliably, update safely, report health accurately, and recover predictably in safety-critical environments.
As a Staff Embedded Linux Platform Engineer, you will own shared platform capabilities from architecture through production delivery. Your success will be measured by dependable updates, diagnosable failures, stable service interfaces, and reliable integration for flight-software teams. Staff-level engineers set technical direction across platform boundaries, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and establish standards used across the shared stack.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the design, implementation, validation, and lifecycle of embedded middleware services for autonomous aircraft
- Define and evolve IPC, communications-bridge, OTA-update, logging, observability, and service-lifecycle interfaces used across flight software
- Deliver production Rust and C++ with testing, diagnostics, and maintainability built into each platform capability
- Set technical direction for cross-service platform architecture, including interface decisions and tradeoffs affecting multiple flight-software teams
- Partner with flight-software, hardware, and integration teams to ensure platform services operate reliably on embedded Linux aircraft systems
- Investigate failures across software, operating-system, network, and hardware boundaries; drive corrective changes that improve reliability, performance, and operational visibility
- Establish design-review and engineering practices that make services safer to deploy, easier to diagnose, and practical for downstream teams to adopt
Requirements:
- 10+ years developing embedded, systems, or platform software in production environments
- Strong Rust, C++, or comparable systems-programming skills, with experience delivering reliable software on embedded Linux
- Working knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, networking, IPC, and distributed or multi-process systems
- Ability to debug complex behavior across services, operating systems, networks, and hardware
- Experience designing technical interfaces and carrying cross-functional integrations through delivery
- For Staff-level scope, a record of leading architecture across multiple systems and influencing decisions beyond an individual component
- Experience in aerospace, robotics, automotive, industrial, medical, or another high-reliability domain; autonomy, OTA, telemetry, Linux internals, or resource-constrained optimization are relevant
