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Salary: USD 220,000 - 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 makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
The Routing Engine team determines how every Zipline aircraft moves through the world. In this Staff-level role, you will design safe and efficient flight paths that guide aircraft through complex, ever-changing airspace while navigating obstacles, uncertainty, and dynamic conditions in real time. Your work will show up in live flights every day.
You will build optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by aircraft, balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance at scale. These systems operate in real time and must account for weather, airspace restrictions, vehicle performance, operational priorities, and dynamic demand. This is a highly visible, safety-critical function with direct operational impact. The systems you build determine delivery speed, network efficiency, and operational safety in increasingly complex environments.
Engineers on this team work at the intersection of autonomy, distributed systems, and real-world operations. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations. The role combines algorithmic problem-solving with building high-reliability production systems. You'll design the brain of the delivery network, with every improvement showing up in delivery speed, network throughput, and operational reliability.
The tech stack includes Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS. The team leverages modern AI and agentic workflows to increase engineering velocity while maintaining strong system rigor.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services
- Hands-on experience with path planning, graph search, motion planning, or related optimization problems
- Extreme ownership mindset with a track record of driving projects end-to-end
- Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility, high-impact problems
- Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations
- Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals
- Proficiency with modern AI-assisted engineering workflows and tools
- Ability to learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems (specific technology experience less important than problem-solving approach)
