Senior Software Engineer, Maintenance

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.

The Delivery Network Platform team builds the core systems that keep aircraft, sites, and infrastructure ready for live delivery operations. We create the software operators use to understand and control the network in real time, the orchestration systems that move the fleet through it, and the validation platforms that ensure the network behaves correctly as scale and complexity grow.

What you will own

You will own software in the critical path of fleet operations, including:

Network Operating Center software for real-time operational visibility and intervention across aircraft, sites, missions, weather, and demand

Fleet orchestration systems for assignment, routing, scheduling, and rebalancing

Maintenance and asset health systems that connect issue detection to return-to-service

Simulation and validation platforms that evaluate topology, load, and policy changes before they reach production

Platform interfaces and configurable control planes that let other teams extend the network safely

Hard problems, real ownership

Most software roles optimize digital experiences. This role helps run a live autonomous logistics network.

You will work on problems like:

maintaining a trustworthy real-time view of aircraft and critical site assets across the network

keeping the network moving when demand shifts, weather changes, infrastructure degrades, or capacity gets tight

building operator control surfaces that support fast, correct decisions under pressure

simulating future network behavior before production absorbs the risk

These are production systems with immediate operational consequences. You will own critical parts of the platform end to end, make technical and product decisions, and directly influence how the network performs.

How we work

This team operates with high ownership, high trust, and a high technical bar. Engineers are expected to identify important problems, form a clear view of how the system should work, and drive solutions from concept through production.

We also expect engineers to use AI tooling effectively as a force multiplier across exploration, implementation, and debugging, while maintaining strong engineering rigor, judgment, and accountability.

What you will bring

You are likely a strong fit if you:

have a track record of turning ambiguous, high-stakes systems problems into production software others rely on

combine strong systems judgment with product instinct and care about solving the real operational problem

can simplify complexity, define durable abstractions, and improve the architecture around you

care deeply about reliability, correctness, and operator trust

thrive in environments where software, operations, hardware, and product intersect

want to shape architecture and operating models, not just implement scoped features

This role is best suited to engineers who want to own critical systems, make consequential decisions, and shape how a real-world autonomous logistics network scales.

What Else You Need to Know

The starting cash range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensatio…