Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end embedded subsystems for the long-range platform, including firmware, drivers, runtime, and monitoring.
- Deliver and maintain flight- and safety-critical microcontroller software in bare-metal and RTOS environments.
- Define and ship reliability and observability outcomes covering mission success, fault rates, recovery time, and test coverage.
- 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 and resolve high-severity field incidents, drive root-cause analysis, and verify fleet-level resolution.
- Collaborate with avionics, systems engineering, manufacturing, test engineering, and flight operations on integration boundaries, certification inputs, and software release criteria.
Requirements
- Substantial experience shipping production embedded code in C++ or Rust.
- Strong familiarity with Python for test and telemetry tooling.
- Required experience with bare-metal and RTOS environments; embedded Linux experience is preferred.
- Proven experience deploying and operating embedded software in safety- or mission-critical systems such as aviation, robotics, or industrial controls.
- Experience with fault management, deterministic real-time requirements, and validation strategies.
- Ability to read schematics, bring up peripherals from datasheets, and debug hardware/software interactions using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG, and in-field telemetry.
- History of 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.
- Willingness to support field testing, occasional travel, and critical incident response outside standard hours.
Benefits
- Position is based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters.
- Requires occasional travel to flight-test sites.
- Includes participation in incident response outside standard hours during critical fleet incidents.
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/