About Zipline

About You and The Role  

Zipline is at the forefront of a logistics revolution, using autonomous aircraft to deliver just-in-time, lifesaving medical supplies on multiple continents, 7 days a week. We believe access to medical care should not depend on your GPS coordinates. In service of our mission to operate at global scale, we’re growing our perception capabilities, to expand quickly and safely into new products and locations, with the ultimate goal of delivering essential packages right to your doorstep. Our perception team is looking for a state estimation and 3D object tracking expert who is passionate about developing perception systems for the real world. 

What You’ll Do  

• Build the next generation of long-range aircraft and airborne object tracking - you will help keep our Zips safe in crowded airspaces
• Integrate and fuse data from multiple sensing modalities and upstream detectors
• Contribute to architectural decisions around representing and tracking ground obstacles in increasingly dense environments
• Investigate applications of machine learning to object tracking, and make trades between classical and ML-based approaches
• Maintain a tight interaction loop with upstream ML engineers and downstream Behaviors/Planning engineers. You will contribute to defining Perception’s output interfaces.
• Contribute to building acausal, offboard tracking systems that help us scale our labeled data 
• Develop tools, processes and metrics to enable introspection and data-driven iteration on tracking algorithms
• Work with Perception Platform engineers to take your algorithms from prototype to production

What You’ll Bring 

• 5+ years of professional experience developing software for hardware products in a safety-critical field, e.g. aerospace, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles
• Strong mathematical background in Bayesian statistics and Monte-Carlo methods with applications to filtering and state estimation
• Industry experience building data association, track management, and optimization algorithms for multi-object tracking
• Curiosity and exposure to machine learning techniques for object tracking
• Strong software engineering skills, with mastery of relevant languages like Python and C++ (bonus: Rust!)
• Generalist mindset, with the ability to work cross platform, from spooling up cloud compute services to optimizing for embedded systems
• Experience building reproducible data pipelines, metrics, and analysis tools
• Experience deploying trackers on real robots

What Else You Need to Know