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 our operations and extend into more complex, safety-critical environments, the ability to validate and prove our autonomy performance at scale becomes absolutely essential.

We’re looking for 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. This includes planning, perception, control, and all of the decision-making logic that powers our self-flying aircraft.

Our autonomy stack is highly custom-built, and while that gives us unmatched control and performance, it also means standard out-of-the-box testing tools don't work. In this role, you’ll take ownership of developing robust internal platforms for validation — enabling both simulation at scale and rigorous scenario testing — so that autonomy engineers can ship with confidence.

This is not a QA role. It’s a foundational software engineering position building critical systems that will directly shape how we test, verify, and deploy autonomy safely around the world.

What You'll Do 

• 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 autonomy org.
• 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, helping ensure 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

What You'll Bring

• 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

Nice to have

• 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)

What We’re not Looking for

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

What Else You Need To Know

The starting cash ranges for this role is $180,000 - $260,000. 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 compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. This position may be hired at one of three levels based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and demonstrated scope:

• Senior Software Engineer: $180,000 - $220,000
• Staff Software Engineer: $220,000 - $260,000

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!