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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 makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
You will own one or more end-to-end avionics subsystems (such as GNSS, Cellular, IMU) as the primary technical owner for design, implementation, and production readiness. This is a hardware/software boundary role focused on flight- and safety-critical embedded software running on embedded Linux systems, with direct responsibility for aircraft reliability, mission completion rates, and field-maintenance load across a distributed global fleet.
Key responsibilities include:
- Deliver and maintain flight- and safety-critical code on embedded Linux: drivers, device bring-up, real-time data interfaces, fault management, and graceful degradation logic
- Define and ship measurable reliability and observability outcomes (in-field fault rates, test coverage targets); instrument systems so flight-data can detect regressions and prioritize fixes
- Lead hardware-in-the-loop, bench, and field validation for changes; partner with systems, hardware, test engineering, and operations to create repeatable test plans and failure-insertion exercises
- Build and extend tooling for deterministic test, logging, post-flight analysis, and automated regression tests to accelerate safe deployments
- Triage and resolve high-severity field incidents: drive root-cause analysis, implement fixes, and own follow-through until fleet metrics demonstrate resolution
- Collaborate closely with avionics hardware, systems engineering, manufacturing, and flight operations to set integration boundaries, certification inputs, and release criteria
REQUIREMENTS:
- Must-have technical skills: substantial systems-level experience shipping embedded production code in C++ or Rust; experience with embedded Linux environments is required; experience with bare-metal or RTOS environments is nice to have
- Production & safety experience: proven track record deploying and operating embedded software in safety- or mission-critical systems (aviation, robotics, industrial controls, or similar); experience with fault management, deterministic real-time requirements, and validation strategies is required
- Debugging & hardware bring-up: demonstrated ability to read schematics, bring up peripherals from datasheets, and debug hardware/software interaction using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG, and in-field telemetry
- Ownership & outcomes: history of owning subsystem delivery end-to-end, shipping repeatable test suites, and meeting quantified reliability targets
- Logistics & intensity: comfortable with field testing cadence, occasional travel to flight-test sites, and participating in incident response outside standard hours when critical fleet incidents occur
- Education & experience: bachelor's degree in EE/CS or equivalent experience; typically 5+ years in embedded/flight-critical systems OR equivalent demonstrated impact
