Staff Software Engineer
Zipline
Staff Software Engineer
Zipline
Builds and runs autonomous drone delivery
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.
You are hiring into the Staff Software Engineer role on Zipline’s Marketplace team. This team builds the commercial engine that turns Zipline’s delivery network into a scalable business: merchant-facing portals and integrations, marketplace policy and dispatch logic, fulfillment tooling at partner locations, and the billing/settlements backbone that must be financially correct across promotions, refunds, revenue shares, and taxes. These systems run live against real missions—affecting partner operations, customer experience, and cashflow—and must operate across metros and countries with strict safety, reliability, and financial correctness constraints. This hire will be an owner/operator: shipping core services, owning production reliability and incident response, and moving product and architecture forward in a regulated, hardware-integrated logistics environment. Role may require multi-day travel to partner sites and occasional weekend or evening production support during launches.
• Own one or more production services end-to-end in the commerce stack (merchant portal, partner integrations, marketplace platform, billing engine, fulfillment apps, or support tooling), including design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
• Deliver measurable improvements, such as reducing merchant onboarding time by 50% within 6 months for assigned flows, bringing reconciliation variance below 0.1% month-over-month for owned payment paths, and reducing incident-driven customer-impacting downtime to under 30 minutes MTTR for priority services.
• Lead cross-functional launches by defining success criteria, authoring rollout and rollback plans, coordinating with Field Operations, Safety/Compliance, Product, and Finance, and owning post-launch remediation and success metrics.
• Build and enforce marketplace controls and policy tooling that enable operators to safely manage pricing, capacity allocation, and prioritization, including feature gates, experiment scaffolding, and pre-production simulation using historical mission data.
• Ship partner integrations (POS connectors, APIs, and data feeds) with clear SLAs, backpressure handling, and schema/version migration strategies, while serving as the technical lead for critical partner onboarding and incident response.
• Maintain observability and service reliability by defining SLOs, building monitoring and dashboards (Grafana/Honeycomb), and owning alerting thresholds, runbooks, and on-call rotations for assigned services.
• Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and make durable abstraction decisions that reduce cross-product fragmentation.
• Minimum 5+ years building and shipping production distributed systems and web applications; evidence of ownership across frontend, backend, and data/streaming pipelines.
• Must have shipped transactional commerce, payments, billing, or marketplace systems in production at scale (millions of orders/day or multi-region transactional volume), or equivalent experience operating financial reconciliation and settlements pipelines.
• Strong systems skills: production-grade API design, data modelling for ledgers, eventual consistency tradeoffs, schema migrations, and designing for idempotency and retry semantics.
• Demonstrated incident leadership: on-call experience, runbook authorship, performing post-incident root-cause analysis, and driving remediation to prevent recurrence.
• Measured outcomes orientation: able to define and hit specific metrics (reconciliation accuracy, onboarding time, MTTR, throughput/latency targets) and to present trade-offs with data.
• Tech stack experience: deep proficiency in one or more of Go, Python, or scalable backend languages; experience with React or similar for merchant-facing apps; familiarity with Kafka, gRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, observability tools (Grafana, Honeycomb), and build tooling (Bazel) is required for day-one productivity.
• Operating intensity and logistics: able to support occasional off-hours launches and urgent production incidents; available for regular multi-day travel to partner sites (up to ~20% travel typical); preferred to be based near the primary office for hybrid work and rapid cross-functional coordination.
• Must-have traits: rigorous attention to correctness and edge-cases in financial flows, clear bias for measurable ownership and accountability, ability to simplify complex cross-boundary systems into durable abstractions.
• Visa/sponsorship: Zipline can sponsor visas.
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 compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; overtime pay; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as 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, 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!
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.
Zipline builds and operates autonomous drone delivery networks for retailers, restaurants and healthcare systems that need to move products without road traffic. Its electric aircraft carry food, prescriptions and other supplies from partner sites or distribution hubs to customers and health facilities. The company combines aircraft, charging equipment and delivery software with flight operations, so partners buy a logistics service rather than manage their own drones. Merchants use its ordering and tracking tools to reach customers, while governments and health systems contract for medical supply delivery. Zipline was founded in 2014 and has its headquarters in South San Francisco, California.
Explore more opportunities at Zipline