Senior Embedded Software Engineer, Long Range Platform

About Zipline

Zipline is the world's largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world's largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world's largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we've built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people's lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

About You and the Role

As a Senior Embedded Software Engineer, you will help build the software foundation for some of the most critical systems on our aircraft. This role is well suited for an engineer who is excited to work close to the hardware, move fluidly across different embedded environments, and take ownership of complex problems from early prototype through field-ready deployment.

You are a strong software engineer first, with deep curiosity about how systems behave in the real world. You are comfortable working across a range of platforms, whether that means writing low-level firmware, developing within an RTOS, or building software for embedded Linux systems. You enjoy debugging difficult issues, especially at the boundary between software, hardware, and system behavior, and you bring a thoughtful, methodical approach to getting to the root cause.

This is a role for someone who thrives in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment. You are energized by ambiguity, eager to learn new domains quickly, and willing to jump in where needed to help the team move faster. You care about building robust, reliable systems, but you also know how to balance rigor with pragmatism in order to make progress.

Most importantly, you are motivated by the mission. You want to work on meaningful technology, contribute to a small and high-impact team, and help build systems that support Zipline's long-range platform and broader delivery network.

What You'll Do

* Build the embedded software that runs critical flight and safety functions across our aircraft's microcontrollers and embedded Linux edge computers.

* Improve the reliability of the flight software system end to end by partnering closely with hardware, systems, and cross-functional engineering teams on fault management, validation, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.

* Use flight data and runtime analysis to understand system behavior in the real world, improve confidence in performance, and optimize software where it will have the greatest impact.

* Create the metrics, monitoring, and debugging infrastructure needed to support safe, scalable deployment in the field.

* Develop tools and test capabilities that accelerate early-stage evaluation of new sensors, communication systems, and microcontroller platforms.

* Jump into ambiguous, cross-functional problems and help turn early ideas and prototypes into dependable systems that can scale with the network.

What You'll Bring

* Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in at least one strongly typed language. We use C++, Rust, and…