Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Simulation & Validation

About You And The Role

Zipline is building the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering vital medical and commercial supplies across the globe. As we scale operations and extend into more complex, safety‑critical environments, validating and proving our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential. We need a deeply technical software engineer to join the Autonomy Validation team — a core team responsible for building the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support software validation across the entire Autonomy organization.

• Build and own the infrastructure for validating autonomous features and system performance across planning, perception, and control.
• Design and develop simulation tools and scenario generation for large‑scale and high‑fidelity testing of autonomy under real‑world and edge‑case conditions.
• Develop custom tools for validation and testing of autonomy components that plug into our internal autonomy development stack.
• Create scalable, reliable, and automated solutions for running, tracking, and analyzing thousands of validation tasks across the autonomy organization.
• Collaborate deeply with:
  • Autonomy engineers to understand how system behavior should be evaluated.
  • Systems and data engineers to ensure metrics, safety thresholds, and requirements are codified in test infrastructure.
  • Flight test and QA teams to connect real‑world results back into test tools and CI loops.
• Establish best practices for software release validation, ensuring our autonomy stack is safe, measurable, and production‑ready.
• Contribute to internal docs, standards, and validation workflows that scale across the autonomy organization.
• Define validation methodologies and metrics, determining how new autonomy features should be evaluated and measured in simulation.

• 5+ years of experience building software systems for simulation, testing, or safety validation — ideally in robotics, autonomy, aerospace, or other real‑time, safety‑critical domains.
• Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in C++, Rust, or C (Python is a plus for tooling and scripting).
• Hands‑on experience building or working with simulation systems for robotics or autonomous systems, particularly for testing or validation.
• Experience building tools, platforms, or infrastructure used by other engineers.
• Understanding of validation methodologies, including defining metrics, evaluating system behavior, and testing complex electromechanical systems.

• Experience with high‑fidelity simulation or scenario generation frameworks.
• Experience with large‑scale or distributed systems (e.g., cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, AWS).
• Familiarity working with systems engineering concepts (requirements, safety constraints, metrics).
• Exposure to autonomy stacks (planning, perception, control).
• Some exposure to machine learning systems (not required).

• Primarily MATLAB/Simulink‑based simulation experience.
• Roles focused mainly on systems engineering without hands‑on software development.
• Infrastructure‑ or Dev Ops‑focused roles without experience in autonomy or simulation.
• QA/QC‑focused verification roles without significant software engineering ownership.

The starting cash range for this role is $190,000–$230,000 (target, depending on experience). The total compensation package may also include equity, overtime pay, discretionary bonuses, sales incentives, medical, dental and vision insurance, paid time off, and more.

Zipline is an equal‑opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by law.