Senior Software Engineer (Maps Routing)

Join Zipline, a pioneering company in the field of drone delivery. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Routing team, you will design and build optimization algorithms that compute flight paths for our aircraft. Your work will have a direct impact on delivery speed, network throughput, and operational reliability. You will collaborate closely with autonomy and flight operations teams and work on deep technical challenges at the intersection of optimization, distributed systems, and real-time decision-making.

• Designing safe and efficient flight paths for Zipline aircraft, navigating obstacles and dynamic conditions in real time.
• Building optimization algorithms that compute the global set of routes executed autonomously by Zips, balancing reliability, throughput, and flight performance.
• Collaborating closely with autonomy and flight operations teams to design and build systems that directly power flight operations.

• We care far more about how you approach problems than experience with any specific technology. Strong candidates typically have:
• Our current stack includes technologies such as Rust, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS, but we value engineers who can learn quickly and focus on solving the right problems
• We also lean heavily into AI-assisted engineering workflows and expect engineers to use modern tools to amplify productivity while maintaining high standards for system design and code quality
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including autonomy and operations
• Experience operating low-latency, high-availability production services
• Comfort working on ambiguous, high-visibility / high-impact problems
• Strong backend or distributed systems engineering fundamentals
• 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