Base Salary
$125k - $210k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own one or more long-range platform embedded subsystems from design and implementation through production readiness.
- Develop and maintain flight- and safety-critical firmware, drivers, real-time control interfaces, fault management, and graceful degradation logic on microcontrollers.
- Define and deliver measurable reliability and observability outcomes, including mission success, in-field fault rates, test coverage, and MTTR improvements.
- Lead hardware-in-the-loop, bench, and field validation, including repeatable test plans and failure-insertion exercises.
- Build tooling for deterministic testing, logging, post-flight analysis, and automated regression testing.
- Triage high-severity field incidents, drive root-cause analysis, implement fixes, and verify resolution through fleet metrics.
- Collaborate with avionics, systems engineering, manufacturing, test engineering, and flight operations on integration boundaries, certification inputs, and release criteria.
Requirements
- Substantial experience shipping production embedded code in C++ or Rust, with strong Python skills for test and telemetry tooling.
- Experience with bare-metal and RTOS environments and with fault management, deterministic real-time requirements, and validation strategies.
- Proven experience deploying and operating embedded software in safety- or mission-critical systems such as aviation, robotics, or industrial controls.
- Ability to read schematics, bring up peripherals from datasheets, and debug hardware/software interactions using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG, and in-field telemetry.
- Experience owning subsystem delivery end to end, shipping repeatable test suites, and meeting quantified reliability targets.
- Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or computer science, or equivalent experience.
- Typically 5+ years of experience in embedded or flight-critical systems, or equivalent demonstrated impact.
- Embedded Linux experience is nice to have.
- Willingness to support field testing, travel occasionally to flight-test sites, and participate in critical incident response outside standard hours.
Benefits
- Starting cash range of $125,000-$210,000, with potential equity compensation and discretionary annual or performance bonuses.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance and paid time off are available.
- Based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters, with occasional travel to flight-test sites and an intensive field-testing and incident-response cadence.
About Zipline
Zipline was founded to create the first logistics system that serves all humans equally. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges. Leveraging expertise in robotics and autonomy, Zipline designs, manufactures and operates the world’s largest automated delivery system. Zipline serves tens of millions of people around the world and is making good on the promise of building an equitable and more resilient global supply chain. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart and enabling leading healthcare providers to bring care into the home in the United States, Zipline is transforming the way goods move. By transitioning to clean, electric, instant logistics, we can decarbonize delivery, decrease road congestion, and reduce fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access for billions of people. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Zipline is inspiring people, governments, and businesses to imagine what is possible when goods can move as seamlessly as information. To join the team, check out our career page: https://flyzipline.com/careers/