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Zipline

Builds and runs autonomous drone delivery

Senior Software Engineer Datacenter Automation

Site Reliability EngineeringUpdated on Nov 13
Full-timeSouth San Francisco, CA, USA$160k - $220k

About the Job

Requirements

  • At least 5 years of engineering experience, including at least 4 years owning production datacenter, virtualization, or infrastructure automation systems.
  • Hands-on expertise with bare-metal provisioning and imaging using PXE/iPXE, IPMI, or Redfish; hypervisors such as KVM/qemu or ESXi; and storage systems such as Ceph, NVMeoF, or SAN at scale.
  • Kubernetes operations experience, including cluster provisioning and upgrades, control-plane high availability, kubeadm/Cluster API or equivalent, CNI and CSI troubleshooting, and workload scheduling at multi-cluster scale.
  • Production-grade automation and coding skills in one or more of Python, Go, or Rust, and experience with CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, and GitOps practices.
  • Strong networking fundamentals, including VLANs, BGP/EVPN at leaf/spine, LACP, routing, and troubleshooting cluster networking and storage fabrics.
  • On-call and incident experience, including ownership of postmortems and SLIs/SLOs and driving reliability improvements under operational pressure.
  • Ability to work on-site at the South San Francisco headquarters with a regular in-office cadence, participate in on-call rotations, travel occasionally to partner datacenters or field sites, and perform hands-on rack, cabling, and repair work when required.
  • Experience operating in regulated or safety-sensitive environments and following change-control and audit processes.
  • Ability to partner with flight software, field operations, hardware, and SRE teams and translate operational needs into automated, testable systems.

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end lifecycle for datacenter compute and storage, including bare-metal provisioning, hypervisor management, SAN/NVMe storage clusters, network configuration, and Kubernetes cluster lifecycle.
  • Design, build, and operate automation to reduce manual setup time and increase deployment velocity, including PXE/firmware workflows, dynamic inventory, image generation, fleet-wide configuration-drift detection, and automated recovery playbooks.
  • Set and meet reliability and scale targets for provisioning time, node commissioning success rate, cluster upgrade success rate, and mean time to recover.
  • Lead cross-functional runbook and incident ownership for infrastructure incidents affecting flight operations or telemetry, including on-call rotation, incident command for datacenter platform incidents, postmortems, and action items.
  • Instrument and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for hardware health, hypervisor performance, storage latency, Kubernetes control-plane health, and cluster autoscaling behavior.
  • Manage cost, capacity, and lifecycle, including compute and storage capacity planning, automated reclamation, firmware/BIOS/hypervisor patch pipelines, and cold-standby and failover procedures for critical systems.
  • Perform hands-on datacenter work when required, including racking and cabling, troubleshooting hardware failures, capturing forensic logs, and coordinating physical repairs with vendors and field operations.

About the Company

Zipline

Builds and runs autonomous drone delivery

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.

Company size
1,001-5,000
Company stage
Late Stage VC
Total funding
$3.6B
Headquarters
South San Francisco, CA
Founded
2014

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